[cthalupa]

It doesn't have to be - but let's look at reality here. NIH syndrome is everywhere, we have millions of competing protocols and formats, everyone thinks they can build a better solution than someone else, etc.

I suppose that if there was a large push to universally log things in binary the possibility exists that sanity would prevail and we'd get one format that everyone agreed upon, but I don't see any reason that this would be the case when historically it basically never happens.

So, at least from my prediction of a future where binary logging is the norm, we have a half dozen or so competing primary formats, and then random edge cases where people have rolled their own, all with different tools needed to parse them.

Or we could stick with good ol' regular text files and if you want to make it binary or throw it in ELK/splunk or log4j or pipe it over netcat across an ISDN line to a server you hid with a solar panel and a satellite phone in Angkor Wat upon which you apply ROT13 and copy it to 5.25 floppy, you can do it on your own and inflict whatever madness you want while leaving me out of it.

[leni536]

It's not like text formats are universal. Thankfully we have settled on utf-8. The same could happen to a slightly more structured universal binary format that would be more suitable for many applications (like logging) and would have an established toolset just like 'text' now.

[bad_user]

That doesn't make sense. There can be no such thing as a universal binary format, unless you reinvent text/plain. Analyze a little on why we refer to some formats as being text-based and you'll see it.