It's tough because innovations in tools generally require some degree of schema or file format customization. I don't know about other tools but at least with Airtable I know I can always hit the API to get my data, though I will miss out on certain business logic around it like data validation, and probably a lot of other details.
The best proxy I have to allay some of my data portability concerns is how much funding the companies have. Funding is a double-edged sword but comparing two companies, one funded at $50m and the other at $5m, it's hard not to go with the former. I am heartened though to see that some of my favorite tools (Airtable and Coda) have gotten very large investments, which tell me they'll be around for a while. When I see similar products not getting those investments, it's a strong signal to stay away or only use them as a toy.
The reason word is gonna continue to exist long after all these fly-by-night productivity startups have gone under or been bought up and wound down is because it doesn't rely on the cloud to work, though ms seems to be trying to head in that direction unfortunately.
It's not tough. All it needs is to allow me to download the data in whatever format you actually use to store it, or some serialization of it. Myself, or other interested parties, can reverse-engineer it if they're too lazy (or too much into abusive business models) to provide documentation of the format. It's simple as that. The lock-in isn't in the format, it's in the inability to get the full document (and possibly reimport it later) in any format at all.
I sometimes wonder who's more fanatical: the glibc folks or MS. But it seems to have paid off for both teams in the end, so (especially as a young engineer) who am I to judge?
Individual data structures are then binary-serialized into that compound file, but I don't think it's accurate to call it a "memory dump". People often get that impression after looking at the compound file and seeing garbage there, much like unused blocks in memory - but that's because it's a filesystem, and as such, has a concept of unused "sectors". This is also why a freshly saved binary Word file might still contain bits and pieces of old data and metadata.
When talking about SaaS (or more accurately, SaaSS[0]), you can "share" stuff between devices and people, but you don't control the data. You don't get a self-contained file that you can store and use independent of the service.
Just that is enough for me to prefer Word or OpenOffice whenever I can (and really, I just use Org Mode whenever I can get away with it).
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[0] - Service as a Software Substitute. See also: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s....
Could you instead provide an option to bulk export all my notes to my own drive, via a .zip file?
Documents there are just HTML files that will be readable for centuries to come.
Love the fact that it's portable! Plus... no data-mining:)
I have a large set of local html pages that I use for bookmarks, PIM stuff, etc. It's my goto personal organizer. Mostly html 3.x, lots of tables. HTML-notepad has handled these pages without issues. To my surprise, it even displayed a search form embedded on one of these pages elegantly. Really like the way you implemented the editing of links to minimize the steps: click on link, pop-up to edit.
Also integrates into Firefox as a "view source" editor - nice (since it handles my local html pages so well)!
The only basic tag that's missing is the HR tag (horizontal rule). It displays fine but doesn't appear on any of the menus. Tables are very well behaved but... minor point: I expected that pressing TAB within a TD would jump me to the next TD.
It doesn't seem to care about html tags it doesn't understand - basically leaving them alone. This is pretty awesome, since I use the following a lot:
<details>
<summary>
Title (data)
</summary>
Expanded, multi-line (data)
</details>