> ... the messy unix philosophy of treating everything like plain text. If structured data ... You are forgetting a crucial point: plain text is very well defi

> ... the messy unix philosophy of treating everything like plain text. If structured data ... You are forgetting a crucial point: plain text is very well defined. Actually, it was already defined when the first Unix tools were being written. Using plain text means that you can use grep to search the logs of your program, even if your program was written yesterday and grep was written 40 years ago. Structured data? In which format? Who will define the UNIQUE format to be used from now on for every tool? The same people who chose Javascript as the web programming language? Do you realize that choosing plain text prevented any IE6-like monstrosity from happening?