[jkyle]

    And the specs will be gone in 40 years. While ASCII will stick around.

Why would they be gone? You realize ASCII is a 'spec' too?

If a binary format has an open specification, it's as future proof as ASCII. ASCII's durability is due to a clear and open specification that's easily implemented. Not some magic sauce that makes it instantly human readable.

That text you see? It's not what's actually in the file. That's just 1's and 0's like every other format. There's literally no difference between ASCII and any other "binary" format.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Text encodings have come and gone before, too. We don't use the Baudot code on modern computers still, and EBCDIC is confined to IBM mainframes.