> The major problem of both human-readable and binary formats is not the serialized form, but the understanding of the schema (structure) of the data, which mor

> The major problem of both human-readable and binary formats is not the serialized form, but the understanding of the schema (structure) of the data, which more often than not, is completely undocumented. Human-readable formats are worse in this regard, because they justify it by "it's obvious what this is". Exactly - CSV files for instance handle escaping or quoting inconsistently depending on the creator. Even supposedly machine readable text formats like RSS do not always have consistent schemas [0]. Unix programs seem particularly prone to using underspecified text formats as output. [0] https://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html https://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html