Yeah what if? Then they haven't really understood the purpose of markup languages as plain text files for viewing/editing using generic text editors. There was

Yeah what if? Then they haven't really understood the purpose of markup languages as plain text files for viewing/editing using generic text editors. There was no lack of proprietary formats such as MS Structured Format (used by MSO) and it was considered a big success when customers demanded open formats such as SGML/XML-based ones in late 90s/00's. The alternatives aren't even sequential (have fragments and cross pointers, etc). Yes they might be faster because they're closer to the in-memory representations as used by the original/historic app or even primitive memory dumps; marginal speed or size improvements were never a consideration though. And if anything, SQL (almost as old as SGML btw) is a joke as document query language compared to basically any alternative specifically designed for the job (ISO topic maps query language ie. Datalog, XPath and co, SPARQL, DSSSL/Scheme, ...) because of SQL's COBOLness, non-schemalessness, lock semantics/granularity a really bad fit, etc.).