Comment by Chris_Newton

I'm not sure I understand your argument here -- do you think mathematics would be text if it didn't have superscripts and subscripts?

The context for this discussion is how text formats offer various advantages, as cited in the original article. The kind of mathematical notation we’re talking about does not offer many of those advantages, so it isn’t text in the sense that the original article was using the term.

(One could certainly debate whether or not notations like mathematics are “text” by some broader definition, but that doesn’t seem to advance this particular discussion.)

To some extent you seem to be arguing that because tools for working with mathematical text are currently woefully in adequate, mathematics is not text.

In the sense of the original article, yes, I suppose I am.

However, I think the important point is that we have a useful notation that doesn’t enjoy the benefits of plain text because of the lack of good tooling. The words we use to classify that notation don’t matter much.