Why should I use a human readable file format?

Question

Why should I use a human readable file format in preference to a binary one? Is there ever a situation when this isn\'t the case?

EDIT: I did have this as an explana

Answer 1

A major reason is that if someone needs to read the data say, 30 years from now, human readable format can be figured out. Binary is much more difficult.

If your have large data sets that are binary by nature (e.g. images), they obviously can't be stored in any other than binary form. But even then, the metadata could (and should!) be human-readable.