Well, I'm advocating for structured text, not binary. Mostly because I haven't seen a future-proof binary format yet, and editing binary formats indeed would require special tooling. I think - for a data exchange protocol meant to be used between many applications - going structured text instead of binary is a worthwhile tradeoff of little lower efficiency vs. much better accessibility.

EDIT: Some comments here are slowly making me like the idea of a standard structured binary more and more.

It's only "specialized" because we haven't been doing it so it's considered special.

At some point you have to admit that what's meant for the computer is not always byte by byte the same as what's meant for the human.

We try to shove these two together and we screw up both of them.

Empower the computer to be the best that it can be by taking the human out.

Empower and respect the human by giving him/her their own representation.

The "I just want to read the bytes that are on disk" philosophy is inherently limiting and broken when the audience are two very different things (humans vs computers).

My argument is that instead of fighting that we must embrace it.

Yes, because it's: a) inefficient b) invites a lot of wrong assumptions about the storage format, e.g. about the underlying grammar, the maximum length of tokens or the possible characters than could occur in the file. c) requires you to solve the same problems over and over again (how to represent nested lists, graphs, binary blobs, escaped special characters, etc) d) encourages authors to roll their own format and not research if there maybe is an existing format that would solve their case.

I agree with you, the other extreme - treat binary files as sort of opaque black boxes that you can only access with specialized tools beloniging to your application - is even worse. But I don't see why we can't reach some middle ground: have a well-documented, open, binary format that encodes a very generic data structure (maybe a graph or a SQLite-style database) and a simple schema language that lets you annotate that data structure. Then you can develop generic tools to view/edit the binary format even though every application can use it in their own way.

Parsing structured text is slow and inefficient. Also reading out just one part of a data structure stored as text often requires either walking through the file character by character or first slurping the whole thing into memory.

A text editor is specialised to the task of viewing and modifying text in a certain format.