"The unstated issue with a binary format is that we (the users) can't hack. We can't trick. We can't discover." It's also a little backwards. Lots of utilities these days in many high end and Poser level apps make use of the open formats available to these programs to play all sorts of tricks and automate all sorts of tasks. Actually, Poser has this just right. An ASCII file format that can be OPTIONALLY compressed by easily implemented code. Allows for space/time savings of binary with the open hackability of ASCII. Personally? I would have oped for a compressable XML variant... but no one asked me :)