Who gets to decide what "accessible" means? Too many unix programs have their own completely ad-hoc printer and parser for config files, which have different a

Who gets to decide what "accessible" means? Too many unix programs have their own completely ad-hoc printer and parser for config files, which have different assumptions. Some allow comma-separated entries in values. Some space or tabs are significant. Varying comment characters. Varying support for multi-line entries. Varying support for quoted strings. Varying support for unicode. Some are key/value, some are section based. Arbitrary special punctuation abounds. It's a fundamental, unstandardized mess. From the perspective of just a single program, then fine, it does what it needs to and its individual text formats are human-understandable, and its code is quickly banged together to do what it needs with it. From an ecosystem perspective, it's a complete failure of usability and _interoperability_, which is the entire point of Unix philosophy in the first place! Humans aren't the only ones reading & writing config files: Software needs to do it, too, be it applications or automation scripts. Again, text is a horrible substrate for compositing software functionality.