You can at least get the structure out of that from the textual representation. How well do your eyeballs do looking at a hex dump of protobufs or ASN.1?
True, any format can be abused, though I'm not sure SVG could really do much better. What I really love is when people tell me that XML is just sexps in drag: I paste a screenful of lisp, delete a random parenthesis in the middle, and challenge them to tell me where the syntax error is without relying on formatting (the compiler sure doesn't).
Mind you I love the hell out of lisp, it just isn't The One True Syntax over all others.
