Comment by conartist6

Yeah "impedance mismatch" is a good way of putting it.

I wouldn't say we fall into the JSON camp at all though, but quite squarely into the XML-ish camp! We just wrap the inner text in quotes to make sure there's no confusion between the formatting of the text stored IN the document and the formatting of the document itself. HTML is hiding a lot of complexity here: https://blog.dwac.dev/posts/html-whitespace/. We're actually doing exactly what the author of that detailed investigation recommends.

You can see how it plays out when CSTML is used to store an HTML document https://github.com/bablr-lang/bablr-docs/blob/1af99211b2e31f.... Having the string wrappers makes it possible to precisely control spaces and newlines shown to the user while also having normal pretty-formatting. Compare this to a competing product SrcML which uses XML containers for parse trees and no wrapper strings. Take a look at the example document here: https://www.srcml.org/about.html. A simple example is three screens wide because they can't put in line breaks and indentation without changing the inner text!