So I need to run a tool to even be able to read the code. No thank you, if anything goes wrong your file is now garbage.

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benrutter 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

In theory that's true of standard office document files too (.docx etc)? Don't think I've encountered too many issues of that actually happening though in the wild?

I'm mainly just being pedantic to be honest, I realise my comment is just me essentially saying "what could possiblye go wrong?"

	▲	account42 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Word documents absolutely do get messed up if you open it in a different office suite - or even a different enough version of the same suite.

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IshKebab 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Doesn't seem like a real risk - these files are all version controlled.

The bigger problem is you now need custom tooling for your IDE, version control, diff & merge, code review, code hosting, etc. etc.

	▲	conartist6 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		You're spot-on. HTML and XML are similar textual embedding formats for documents which can contain arbitrary text. Neither is particularly good when the documents are syntax trees though. CSTML takes the design ideas that obviously work and adapts them to be natural for syntax trees, like this: https://gist.github.com/conartist6/75dc969b685bbf69c9fa9800c.... The trees always store inside themselves the complete source code as the parser saw it, so there's little fear of not being able to recover the original, and they're quite human-readable unlike, say, docx files. My team and I are working on building out the VCS, diff and merge, review, hosting, grepping, blogging and other kinds of solutions necessary to make our format able to take over as a de-facto standard.