Re: Saving markup formats

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

I am against structured data formats for an Emacs buffer because there
is no way to reconcile that cleanly with the Emacs Lisp model of a
buffer as a string of text.  I thought about this thoroughly 15 years
ago.

The problem is not just a matter of implementation.  It is a problem
of irreconcilable design concepts.  In an ordinary word processor,
the only goals are at the UI level.  In Emacs, though, we need to make
any design fit the Emacs programming model.

    I thought the rms was saying "why store data somewhere other than a
    buffer?".

No, I was talking about what the buffer contents can consist of.

	      In other words, why add DOM (for example) to Emacs so that
    we can store text in it when we already have text buffers?

I don't know the term "DOM", so I have to guess just what this means.
If it means that a buffer would consist of multiple strings, which are
put together through some other kind of structure, that is just no
good.  It can't make kill and yank work.