[O] are super-hidden technical blocks required?

[Torsten Wagner]

Hi,

I notice that with all this upcoming syncing and interaction with
third party programs as well as with programming languages org-mode
starts to require more and more information which are actually not
intend to be read in plain text. E.g. a UUID-number for each task to
enable two-way syncs with calendars.
Following the mailing list, I notice that it gets more and more
difficult for the devs to keep track of how to handle the text parsing
and each fix in the parsers need to be carefully checked against a
steadily increasing amount of cases to avoid the introduction of new
problems.

First I was wondering if it would be time to switch org-mode from text
to some sort of XML. The advantages would be a much much easier way to
parse data and it would make many many things for the devs much
easier. However, switching org-mode to some sort of XML would be
against one of its key-features... being plain text.

There are property-blocks and drawers to "hide" stuff, but at the
moment they contain a mixed set of data relevant and non-relevant for
a user.
Would it help to introduce a technical-property block which only
contains information intend to be used by other programs and parsers?
This blocks could be hidden under all normal means unlike really
someone want to see them and hit a special key-combo. That might be a
way to keep the format clean and plain text but get some of the
features known e.g. from XML. I know this might be tricky esp. copy
and paste operations need to take care that those blocks get correctly
moved.

What do you think?

Torsten