The code is not the data. It is a representation. Even the LISP code you write as text is not the code meant by "code is data", that would be the in-memory representation created by the reader, i.e. a bunch of conses.
The rich-text, WYSIWYG interface shows the data people want to interact with; they care about the text in their document and how it is formatted on the page, not how it is stored on disk.
So I disagree with z1mm32m4n about the power of plain text. Plain text is useful in Unix because as a storage format it corresponds to the usage pattern of typing text into a terminal; meaning interactive data entry and reading from a file don't have to be different.
But plain text is a lie on all modern Unix systems, it has been replaced by a mix of text and escape codes. Recently I tried to cat initial-commands.txt - | some-interactive-program and did not get the expected result because the pipe between cat and the program was not a tty. (The solution was to use script to enforce tty-like behavior.) The reason these escape codes exist is that people wanted more than plain text could give them (e.g. color).
However, this is not to say that a universal storage format for data of a kind (e.g. formatted text) would not be useful to avoid siloed applications; if you are working with data that already has a standard format, inventing your own and requiring import and export for everything else is just silly.
The rich-text, WYSIWYG interface shows the data people want to interact with; they care about the text in their document and how it is formatted on the page, not how it is stored on disk.
So I disagree with z1mm32m4n about the power of plain text. Plain text is useful in Unix because as a storage format it corresponds to the usage pattern of typing text into a terminal; meaning interactive data entry and reading from a file don't have to be different.
But plain text is a lie on all modern Unix systems, it has been replaced by a mix of text and escape codes. Recently I tried to cat initial-commands.txt - | some-interactive-program and did not get the expected result because the pipe between cat and the program was not a tty. (The solution was to use script to enforce tty-like behavior.) The reason these escape codes exist is that people wanted more than plain text could give them (e.g. color).
However, this is not to say that a universal storage format for data of a kind (e.g. formatted text) would not be useful to avoid siloed applications; if you are working with data that already has a standard format, inventing your own and requiring import and export for everything else is just silly.