I've frequently wondered why a hierarchical approach is the norm for text formatting. It seems that many problems could be solved trivially using a text buffer and a list of formatting sequences defined by a starting index and a length. The only place I've seen this in practice is in Telegram's TL Schema [1]. Is this method found anywhere else?
Edit to note: there is one obvious advantage to in-band markup such as HTML -- streaming formatted content. Though I wonder if this could be done with a non-hierarchical method, for example using in-band start tags which also encode the length.
Edit 2: looks like Condé Nast maintains a similar technology called atjson [2].
Edit to note: there is one obvious advantage to in-band markup such as HTML -- streaming formatted content. Though I wonder if this could be done with a non-hierarchical method, for example using in-band start tags which also encode the length.
Edit 2: looks like Condé Nast maintains a similar technology called atjson [2].
[1]: https://core.telegram.org/api/entities
[2]: https://github.com/CondeNast/atjson