Thanks, both of you! And yes, it is interesting.
It just occurred to me that this sort of approach to formatting might also effectively simplify formatting code.
I have RTF files that seem full of unnecessary bold commands... bold being set 5-6 times in a row, for what is basically a single contiguous bolded portion. Converted into this parallel stream format, when time comes to reencode into HTML or LaTeX, that sort of a mess would only generate a single <b>...</b> or \textbf{...}.
Which is fortuitous, because I've also been thinking of how formatting could be refactored so as to remove redundancy.
- Ahi