This refrain just cheeses me right off every time. Nothing is human readable! Everything requires a program to read it, because no human being can read states of charge or states of magnetic polarization directly.
What makes something 'human readable' or not is a software tool. Underlying that tool is a data format that the tool can accept and display. What everyone means when they try to sound smart by saying 'human readable' is just 'plain text.' In other words, they know where to find the dumbest possible reader/editor for it. Text editors are the dumbest possible editors because they cannot constrain edits to conform with the grammar of the interface language; they allow bugs at a point in the development process where it is trivial to disallow bugs, especially considering that interface languages should probably be, at most, regular languages.
Perhaps you should stand on that soapbox a little more often. People are way to enamored with their little 1970's ed and ex derivatives.
Every veteran in the field knows that data and data structure are the primary enablers for almost any solution. Nevertheless, we have regressed in the last decades w.r.t. that. Had we had better structured (AST-driven) editors and context dependent representation, XML (or sth similar) might have taken off.
Personally, I blame the exponential increase in inflow of new developers. Nothing but reinventing the wheel without knowing history.
I've a certain sympathy for your position but I interpret "human readable" as meaning readable and somewhat comprehensible without using specialized tools.
But when is a tool specialized? Would a dedicated XML / JSON / YAML / ASN.1+DER / Avro / Protobuf / Parquet editor be specialized? And what if that hierarchical standard would be the de facto industry standard? Is a binary file editor specialized? What about a structured assembler?
Personally, I think most editors are rather specialized. They deduce the character sets, often add syntax highlighting and provides paging for very large files. High level strongly typed languages, such as modern C#, Java, Scala are designed to be used in an IDE. You could view and edit it, but it provides a difficult situation (not unlike editing XML by hand).
"Human readable" is very subjective. It depends on the person, the task at hand, the intended recipients, etc. etc.
This refrain just cheeses me right off every time. Nothing is human readable! Everything requires a program to read it, because no human being can read states of charge or states of magnetic polarization directly.
What makes something 'human readable' or not is a software tool. Underlying that tool is a data format that the tool can accept and display. What everyone means when they try to sound smart by saying 'human readable' is just 'plain text.' In other words, they know where to find the dumbest possible reader/editor for it. Text editors are the dumbest possible editors because they cannot constrain edits to conform with the grammar of the interface language; they allow bugs at a point in the development process where it is trivial to disallow bugs, especially considering that interface languages should probably be, at most, regular languages.
I'll step off my soapbox, now.