I remember in the Mac community in the late 80's (pre-web browser) that there were several text formats that were designed to be both readable, mailable in days of mailers messing with line lengths, and also machine parsable. Most notably in the Mac community was SEText, but there were quite a few others. There was even a SEText browser at one point, that would display this very humanly readable text format into a rich text format with section links, sort of a proto-RSS.

Use of the nomenclature was not actually part of the SEText standard, but the most popular user of SEText was Tidbits (which though first published in 1990 today would be considered a blog), and it was one the first I know of to use it in almost every issue in the early 90's when a lot of the links were to things like ftp:, wais: gopher:, etc.

To this day, I still find myself doing it in text emails.