my guess is it is the latter. If I have my own framework and I want to operate with this standard, I need to have the ability to map to and from ONNX's format.

my guess is it is the latter. If I have my own framework and I want to operate with this standard, I need to have the ability to map to and from ONNX's format. I don't think it is intended for people to write directly in ONNX's format to maintain compatibility. If it were, I'd imagine it would fall flat very quickly as people wouldn't want to rewrite everything in the hopes that their framework of choice will adopt it. Seems the intent is more like .odt to me than, say, Markdown.