Your argument raises a lot of good points. I actually agree that binary does lose all of the metadata and documentation that goes with it. That is a big probl

Your argument raises a lot of good points. I actually agree that binary does lose all of the metadata and documentation that goes with it. That is a big problem. That is why I think it is also important to include some sort of documentation like an Xdmf file [1]. That is what I use to tie everything together in my particular project. HDF5 is fine. In fact, I would have strongly preferred my colleagues using HDF5 over the proprietary format that they did end up using. But HDF5 requires an additional library. I did not want to use any external libraries in my particular project (other than MPI), so I tried to look for a solution that achieves close to what HDF5 can achieve but without requiring something as "heavy" as HDF5. I have to admit that perhaps my design choice does not work for more complex situations, but I think it is something people should consider before tying themselves down too much. [1] http://www.xdmf.org/index.php/Main_Page http://www.xdmf.org/index.php/Main_Page