But when is a tool specialized? Would a dedicated XML / JSON / YAML / ASN.1+DER / Avro / Protobuf / Parquet editor be specialized? And what if that hierarchical

But when is a tool specialized? Would a dedicated XML / JSON / YAML / ASN.1+DER / Avro / Protobuf / Parquet editor be specialized? And what if that hierarchical standard would be the de facto industry standard? Is a binary file editor specialized? What about a structured assembler? Personally, I think most editors are rather specialized. They deduce the character sets, often add syntax highlighting and provides paging for very large files. High level strongly typed languages, such as modern C#, Java, Scala are designed to be used in an IDE. You could view and edit it, but it provides a difficult situation (not unlike editing XML by hand). "Human readable" is very subjective. It depends on the person, the task at hand, the intended recipients, etc. etc.