[somat]

A fair assessment, but at the end of the day it is all just a stream of bits, bits packed into a into a structure, how do you know the structure?, how do you know how wide each part is? or bits packed into an array of encoded bytes. what is the encoding? how do you parse it?

The array of encoded bytes despite it's complexity overhead has an advantage in that is lays on the human visible side of computing, that part of computers designed for the human to use. I have to admit more often than not I prefer to eat the overhead and have an interface that I can see.