In my original comment to which you replied I wrote "The best of both worlds is to have a text representation coupled with one-to-one binary encoding;" for the

In my original comment to which you replied I wrote "The best of both worlds is to have a text representation coupled with one-to-one binary encoding;" for the reasons I wrote in that comment. I am aware of all your points on ser/des of text and I fully agree with them. Also, I was constraining the use case for text to data that is either the input of humans, or generated from those inputs. For data that is gathered from devices, etc. I don't think a text representation would be of much use. Also, between a set of parameters entered by a human, and an audio or a video, there are a lot of use cases in between (all of the points in space of N-sided polygon after a human entered 4 or 5 parameters, ...., generation of statistical data from parameters or other inputs, ...). I think, as a rule of thumb, that the less close the data is to the inputs of humans, the less sense it makes to store the textual representation.