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On the other hand, the fact that there are so many Markdown-based editors that can read the files you create in Obsidian gives plain text format more resilience over time. Even if Obsidian were to disappear, your writing and ideas will still be accessible in the future.



Also I would argue that you can rather simply write a parser for the basic markdown syntax and convert it to e.g. HTML or plain text if necessary by getting rid of markdown specific syntax.


Or use pandoc[0] to convert a markdown file to an HTML file (and many other file types)

[0]: https://pandoc.org/


Markdown is plain text, with conventions. To lose the ability ti see your data would requiring us to lose utf8 encoding which is unlikely as it is self perpetuating.


Maybe many people on HN can do this. A lot fewer people than that on HN want to do it. And many people who use Markdown outside of HN can't do it.


Realistically, only a few people have to do it and open source a toolkit. Also I don’t really think that we’ll have that issue with markdown because it’s widespread and rather well established. This doesn’t invalidate your point, which I absolutely agree with.


Also it’s not true for the file format for canvas which is probably way harder to parse correctly.


Way harder means what? An extra 3 days of effort to the future open source Obsidian clone?




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