[atombender]

The reason I don't buy into this is that it shouldn't be necessary: If I've marked a word as bold, I can see it without format codes. The rendering is the desired outcome. In modern documents there's no kind of magical markup that somehow cannot be visualized "canonically". Format codes are less efficient as a representation because they obscure the "real" representation.

By analogy, to me it's like people preferring to draw by writing SVG, when drawing lines and circles is much more natural in a visual medium. Its not like sheet music where notation describes a completely different medium.