> which is much much more futureproof when one looks 10/15/20 years in the future IMO the main reason why binary formats suffered from compatibility issues in

> which is much much more futureproof when one looks 10/15/20 years in the future IMO the main reason why binary formats suffered from compatibility issues in the past was huge variations of hardware. We had little endian/big endian CPUs, 16/32/64 bit bitness, earlier in the past there were even weirder computers with non-two complement signed integers, or 12 bits in a memory word. By now we only have big endian CPUs. Vast majority of them are 64 bits. All of them are using IEEE floats, at least for FP64 and FP32 numbers; for FP16 there’re several versions, unfortunately. None of that is likely to change in 10 or 20 years. For applications where performance matters, like image and video codecs, we do have binary formats which are older than 20 years, still in wide use, with little to no compatibility issues. Examples are PNG from 1997, or Mpeg-4 from 1998.