Text formats like JSON and XML are easy to write by hand now with better editors and Python scripts for parsing them are easy to write. Idiosyncratic file formats may not be escaped correctly. An regex scan for "Inactive" can give false positives and negatives. A program that checks JSON will fail rather than giving a false answer.
Postel's law of accepting liberally and emitting conservatively is getting blamed for leading to bloated programs that need to parse bad input. https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong-0...
Text formats like JSON and XML are easy to write by hand now with better editors and Python scripts for parsing them are easy to write. Idiosyncratic file formats may not be escaped correctly. An regex scan for "Inactive" can give false positives and negatives. A program that checks JSON will fail rather than giving a false answer.
"The internet is running in debug mode" : http://java-is-the-new-c.blogspot.com/2014/10/why-protocols-...
File formats can give way to programs using Sqlite. https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html