The document is just plain markup exported to HTML, no fancy data formats involved here. It just happens to explain emacs and org mode, so naturally there's a l

The document is just plain markup exported to HTML, no fancy data formats involved here. It just happens to explain emacs and org mode, so naturally there's a lot of writing and code blocks that "makes absolutely no sense unless you've been an avid Emacs user for years." But this is the property of the document, not the org mode markup itself. That being said, there are many tools built on the org mode format to help with things like todo management and interactive execution of code blocks, but it doesn't make it any less plain text.