@icst @nus i dunno maybe poettering patented everything else.

although for storing numbers, we did store them as plaintext quite a lot. formats like OBJ, STL, BVH, store numbers as text, and those are or were common industry formats. OpenDDL does it too. GLTF does but has optional support for binary blobs.

i like to build things on top of CBOR these days (sometimes a bastardized version of EBML too) but the appeal of the text formats is you can open them in a garden variety text editor and inspect whats going on.

protobufs, cbor, et all, don't really have an equivalent to "open it in vim and inspect if its corrupted/wrong"