Seems to me that the problem is the use of text formats in general. I understand the need for universality, but all it would take to solve this is for major OS

Seems to me that the problem is the use of text formats in general. I understand the need for universality, but all it would take to solve this is for major OS vendors to ship with a clean simple HDF5 editor. I would also like to see a binary UI description format become a web3c standard, because, good luck trying to eliminate all the quadratic strlen in web services.