What is stopping you explicitly defining such a standard? Gruber did it with Markdown and that seems to have gone pretty well.
I use HTML for all my notes and writing, and I guess I have my own loosely defined "Standard" in the sense that I use a subset of tags, very light use of CSS, a predefined document structure, and I use the abbreviated model of HTML that doesn't require certain tags to be closed.
I'm working on exactly that right now! My next blog post will be a "proposal" for a standard, which I'm going to also post to the W3C working group forums to see if I can get traction from standards committees/browser engines.
What I'm working on now is the specific Sanitizer API options which explicitly list out the semantic HTML elements which are allowed, as well as the valid attributes. That will make implementing the standard pretty straight forward. However, the API doesn't cover style properties, so I'm wondering how deep I should delve into CSS, or just leave it alone. Not as clear cut as it seems because of @imports and fonts.
There's a bunch of this-or-that questions I'm trying to figure out like how restrictive should the Content Security Policy be? Will it allow external URLs for images/media, only secure sites, or be totally locked down to just data:// urls? What about file:// urls? Should I even use the Sanitizer API? If you open a document and there are extraneous elements, should they be ignored or deleted? An editor which potentially destroys a page isn't ideal. What about iframes? If you want to add a YouTube video, it's done via an iframe, so killing it all together doesn't seem like a great idea. Then again, that's a potential security/privacy issue. Etc. etc.
I'm leaning towards a restrictive, self-contained format which is as risk-free to implement as possible from a security and privacy standpoint. Basically re-creating how secure the .mhtml files are now. However, that's a lot less flexible than allowing external content to be loaded. But from everything I've seen online, any "standard" which isn't by default stupidly safe will be a non-starter from the browser makers perspective, and my ultimate goal is to have the doc format be something that can be natively opened. Even if I forgo that dream, it may just make sense from a practical standpoint - forcing the files to be useful only as documents. But then again... you get the idea.
I'm hoping to come up with a rationale for all the decisions, write as complete a spec as possible before opening it all up to input to avoid bikeshedding as much as possible. We'll see how it ends up!
What is stopping you explicitly defining such a standard? Gruber did it with Markdown and that seems to have gone pretty well.
I use HTML for all my notes and writing, and I guess I have my own loosely defined "Standard" in the sense that I use a subset of tags, very light use of CSS, a predefined document structure, and I use the abbreviated model of HTML that doesn't require certain tags to be closed.