We certainly need some standardization over binary formats, that's for sure. It could take away a lot of redundant work that's been done over and over again (i.

We certainly need some standardization over binary formats, that's for sure. It could take away a lot of redundant work that's been done over and over again (i.e. serialization/deserialization). This need not be at O/S level though. It can be a bunch of standards, like HTML, and each O/S could provide the appropriate implementations. And the data format does not need a particular schema, it just needs a structural description. The same format could be used to describe schemas.