> it remains decodable even when the specific tooling is lost, making it the most robust encoding for long-term information survival.
This may be true if you mean text written on a physical medium (especially if it's engraved in stone or clay), but it's not true at all if you mean text stored in a computer medium. Text is just binary with a dedicated codec. Good luck interpreting Chinese plain text files after humanity has forgotten about Unicode and UTF-8.
While text-based representations may be easier to decipher than random binary data even without knowing the encoding (as in an archeological setting), it's hardly going to be the easiest. Bitmaps, for example, have a much more limited set of symbols than Unicode, so I'd bet it would be much easier to display a long lost .bmp file than a random .txt file even a few hundred years from now. Same goes for raw audio, too. Now, JPEG and MP3 might be much more difficult, because the encoding is doing much more work.
This may be true if you mean text written on a physical medium (especially if it's engraved in stone or clay), but it's not true at all if you mean text stored in a computer medium. Text is just binary with a dedicated codec. Good luck interpreting Chinese plain text files after humanity has forgotten about Unicode and UTF-8.
While text-based representations may be easier to decipher than random binary data even without knowing the encoding (as in an archeological setting), it's hardly going to be the easiest. Bitmaps, for example, have a much more limited set of symbols than Unicode, so I'd bet it would be much easier to display a long lost .bmp file than a random .txt file even a few hundred years from now. Same goes for raw audio, too. Now, JPEG and MP3 might be much more difficult, because the encoding is doing much more work.