I'm also concerned about long term readability. Some of those documents might have at least a few hundred years of people wanting to read them before them. Can

I'm also concerned about long term readability. Some of those documents might have at least a few hundred years of people wanting to read them before them. Can any of those innovative new data formats stay around long enough, especially if they're proprietary? We might change computation platform and hardware paradigms a few times as well, just think back to 20 years ago. A lot of measured raw data is already lost due to this; it's about impossible to parse any more. Pure text can survive far more easily.