These formats must have made sense with Notepad (no autocomplete balanced tags, indentation, syntax highlight) and custom parsers in C. Eric Raymond's, in his

These formats must have made sense with Notepad (no autocomplete balanced tags, indentation, syntax highlight) and custom parsers in C. Eric Raymond's, in his 2003 book, advocating terse text formats in chapters 5 and 18 https://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/graphics/taoup.pdf https://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/graphics/taoup....