I wonder where this comes from. There's no need for next generation. People have, for thirty years or so, successfully printed their data into a suitable textu

I wonder where this comes from. There's no need for next generation. People have, for thirty years or so, successfully printed their data into a suitable textual streams for processing with programs glued together with pipes, and optionally parsed the results back into some native format if so required. Meanwhile, none of the "next generation" pipes have gained any momentum. Obviously they solve something which is either not a problem or they do solve some problems but create new ones in greater numbers than what they solved, tipping the balance into negative. Any object or intermediary format you can think of can be represented in text, and you're back to square one. For example, even if there's XSLT and XQuery, you can just serialize trees of XML elements into a row-based format of expression and use grep on the resulting stream to effectively make hierarchical searches inside the tree.