LlamaIndex argues Markdown is the universal format for agents

LlamaIndex says Markdown has become a universal representation between humans and agents, preserving headings, lists, and tables while remaining readable to models.

Since most unstructured documents are not natively in Markdown, the main challenge is the translation layer, which the company addresses with models that convert document containers into Markdown.

The quoted post adds that Markdown keeps table columns intact, with HTML used for tables with merged headers.