First, rule of silence has nothing to do with plain text. It applies to any human-machine interface including GUI and physical knobs. Second, you are right abo

First, rule of silence has nothing to do with plain text. It applies to any human-machine interface including GUI and physical knobs. Second, you are right about structured data and all. The only thing is that it's either impossible or extremely hard to achieve. Many have tried, all of them failed. Windows now has a mix of registry, file and database configs which is a nightmare and is much worse than any unix. AIX has smitty and other config management solutions which are a bitch to work with if you want something non-trivial. Solaris is heading this direction (actually it's heading to the grave but it's another story) and it's also not nice. There are a lot of other OSes and programs which tried to do it but failed. This is much like with democracy: it's a terrible form of ruling, too bad we have nothing better. This is exactly what's up with unix configs and data formats. It is possible to make some fancy format and tools which will achieve it's goal for like 80% of the time. But it will cause huge amount of pain in the ass in the rest 20% and this is where it will be ignored and you'll end up with a mix of two words which is worse than one.