very very very true... i am a BIG fan of ascii files for configuration information... however, data files, i like making it difficult for people to edit them by hand... i have discovered that if you make datafiles easy to edit by hand, the "users" will most likely hurt the file format and cause your program to die... (i remember once someone edited a datafile by hand, and it caused a race condition that brought down a Sun E450... that was painful...) so, i guess, once again, the point becomes: "what are they asking you to do, what will they ask you to do? use the right tool for the right job."