That is a good point. It is a good observation that just binary encoding numbers does not mean you have an efficient serialized representation. And, that someti

That is a good point. It is a good observation that just binary encoding numbers does not mean you have an efficient serialized representation. And, that sometimes that can be so bad that even encoding numbers as serialized text beats it out. I think what threw me off was the context of this discussion, which was 3MF file format. For such cases, the usefulness of humans opening up the data in text editors is somewhat contrived. I believe that tradeoff for the 3MF format was a mistake, and will likely hinder broad adoption. I'm however mostly concerned with the extra processing required in order to decode the human readable files. We're talking a likely speedup of a factor of 50-100. For models that push this limit, imagine a file that takes 60 seconds to process. This isn't entirely unreasonable for a model with insane level of details. If they instead had gone for a binary file representation, the load time would likely be less than a second. Failing to recognize this tradeoff for human readable text... is unfortunate.