Binary formats win I think when the ASCII format is significantly greater in storage size and parsing speed. XPM/PBM/XBM are enormous compared to any binary ima

Binary formats win I think when the ASCII format is significantly greater in storage size and parsing speed. XPM/PBM/XBM are enormous compared to any binary image format. And remember these images used to get put on 1.4meg floppies and sent over 2400baud modems. It's basically use the right tool for the job. For pixels that's a binary format. For mostly text, text itself works pretty well.