It's very hard to survey with precision the exact state of a body of rich text. I don't even like using rich text editors for prose, for this reason. HTML/Markd

It's very hard to survey with precision the exact state of a body of rich text. I don't even like using rich text editors for prose, for this reason. HTML/Markdown are the closest thing we have to "rich text that's explicit and precise", but at that point you're back to plain text with special machine-readable syntaxes. And who wants to write out explicit formatting directives solely so that formatting can then drive program behavior?