[TeMPOraL]

You're getting close, but you missed the essence. It's not about text vs. binary. It's also not about "well-documented" vs. "ad-hoc". It's about preserving semantics.

"The Unix Way" means throwing away all semantic data - passing plain strings with no context, which are then parsed and re-parsed in an completely ad-hoc manner, usually with regexp-based shotgun parsers.

Note how SQL injections, or XSS attacks are prevented - people stopped stiching strings together and started generating proper instructions through code. User input is sanitized and driven through process that converts it from untrusted string to trusted data structure. Typing SQL queries in a semantic-aware system looks almost the same as stiching strings (thanks to SQL being flat), but now you can't possibly SQL-inject yourself.

So in general: stick to text formats or not, but whatever you do, never glue data structures using tools that work on data medium layer, that are not aware of the structure and meaning of data they are operating on. E.g. never glue strings to build SQL queries or HTML code.