Exactly. But in this case that opaque data format is exactly the thing that enables live editing. Gdocs runs on Operational Transforms. There is basically no wa

Exactly. But in this case that opaque data format is exactly the thing that enables live editing. Gdocs runs on Operational Transforms. There is basically no way to do OT without a ton of back end support which means tightly coupled APIs. Martin Kleppmann has a great talk on CRDTs for distributed text editing. It is a hard problem. You also need a dedicated binary format (basically a table) but at least in this case it is a lot easier to use an open format with federated clients.