[lmm]

You have it entirely backwards. Markdown is successful precisely because it isn't a semantic format; it's a reaction to overengineered semantic formats like HTML. Markdown is a purely presentational format; asterisks don't represent some abstract notion of emphasis, they denote italic text. The whole point is that you don't "maintain plaintext and annotations separately"; the formatting is part of the text.

[_mql]

I agree on over-engineered semantic formats. HTML used to be a document representation format. But for me it has turned into a presentation format, with all the DOM manipulation etc. This is perfectly fine, I just had to realize it. Now i just use divs and spans for my layouts, not trying to 'render' semantics. However, on a higher level there should be some document representation formats that can be turned into anything. That's the idea.

Well and I really don't think inline styles / annotations are good.

[lmm]

>Well and I really don't think inline styles / annotations are good.

Oh but they are. For the vast majority of content creators, semantics are inseparable from presentation; an article I write really does the semantics of looking how it looks, and can't be transformed into something different.

Just like in programming, to extract a good abstraction such as the semantic content of an article you need to test against three different implementations. But most people only write for and test against a single presentation version, so it should be no surprise that even if they try and separate the semantics and the presentation, they'll get it wrong.