There is a good reason for why one would want to store data the same way as when you work on it. It removes the need to process the data itself. A common approa

There is a good reason for why one would want to store data the same way as when you work on it. It removes the need to process the data itself. A common approach is to follow it up with a fast compression algorithm when storage space is important. The difference in post-processing when having to decode text is around two orders of magnitude, which is very significant. In the case of the 3MF format in question in this article, I find the tradeoff for human readable files to be a very strange one. The benefit of that at the cost of say waiting a minute to load a file that would otherwise take a second, is a puzzling one. But, it's all a tradeoff after all. If humans work with the files, it is a strong argument work with text. When software stores and loads files, it will likely be a poor choice to store data as text. But, you are right. The file size consideration is not all that relevant. However, what was mostly discussed was the argument that serializing text that represents numbers is more space efficient. Which as I mentioned a few times, can only be the case when the straight serialization of the numbers is done poorly.