Manifest background independence is primarily an aesthetic rather than a physical requirement. It is analogous and closely related to requiring in differential geometry that equations be written in a form that is independent of the choice of charts and coordinate embeddings. If a background-independent formalism is present, it can lead to simpler and more elegant equations. However, there is no physical content in requiring that a theory be manifestly background-independent – for example, the equations of general relativity can be rewritten in local coordinates without affecting the physical implications.