Comment by lewisjoe

A lack of universally recognized richtext format is really a problem. Why? practically any rich-text that needs to be rendered across platforms (web and mobile devices) are now being stored as html or markdown or app-dependent json.

HTML was never envisioned as a cross-platform richtext format and markdown lacks almost half of all formatting features. Specialzed json is even more evil because the content becomes unrenderable when the parent app goes out of existence.

op's suggestion (accomodating formattings as unicode bytes) might not be optimal however I'm happy at least somebody thought of this as a problem to solve.