> But first, ask yourself why you are designing a binary format, unless maybe it's a new media container. Binary formats are ideal for critical applications wh

> But first, ask yourself why you are designing a binary format, unless maybe it's a new media container. Binary formats are ideal for critical applications where you want to either 1) parse the file correctly, 2) fail to parse the file at all. Non-binary formats (and re-use of existing binary formats) tend to have failure modes where you parse the file incorrectly due to a bug, resulting in something bad happening like a security exploit.