If I have to be honest I don't see much from this either, but a potential upside is structural separation of text and presentation in a way that's different from HTML/CSS, in this case the content would be pure ASCII text as opposed to a tree structure/object model.

I'm not sure I agree with this premise either, the hierarchical structure seems inherently semantical to me, but the argument of the OP is it isn't the case.

> what's the point of making it a text format at all?

The text part is ASCII, so it make sense to represent it as such. The "presentation" part could be binary.

The only reason I used a text format is because I wanted to keep the code as simple as possible. Only introducing extra complexity when I hit a wall somewhere. I don't know if the current format will scale to more complex use cases, but I really like the fact that you can read HTML and reason about it, so I kept to that in Hope as well.

As for the text part, that is simple. I like to be able to manipulate text as text. There are many many tools to work with plain text. I can use regular expressions to search through text, get ranges of the result and apply an annotation to those ranges. You lose a lot of that in any other format.