Ok but what I'm talking about is a little more specific. Talking about "human readability" of JSON and XML is a little bit like talking about human readability

Ok but what I'm talking about is a little more specific. Talking about "human readability" of JSON and XML is a little bit like talking about human readability of JPEG or MP3. Chasing after it creates a lot of problems. Formats like JSON and XML often carry lots of textual information so it's tempting to want them to be like "just like text but with some extra stuff" but that creates its own problems. So it would be interesting to have something like JSON but philosophically treat it like MP3. Meaning, don't assume that humans must fiddle with the bytes in a text editor with great ease so that the representation can be designed without the influence of "would the raw bytes look pretty to people?".