You are absolutely right that XML is better for document structures. My current theory is that Yjs [0] is the new JSON+XML. It gives you both JSON and XML type

You are absolutely right that XML is better for document structures. My current theory is that Yjs [0] is the new JSON+XML. It gives you both JSON and XML types in one nested structure, all with conflict free merging via incremental updates. Also, you note the issue with XML and overlapping inline markup. Yjs has an answer for that with its text type, you can apply attributes (for styling or anything else) via arbatary ranges. They can overlap. Obviously I'm being a little hypabolic suggesting it will replace JSON, the beauty of JSON is is simplicity, but for many systems building on Yjs or similar CRDT based serialisation systems is the future. Maybe what we need is a YjsSchema... https://github.com/yjs/yjs/ https://github.com/yjs/yjs/