Well, none of these are hard and fast rules, just rules of thumb that let you work with Unix's strengths. For example, if you store your data in config files, you can keep them in git (or whatever), and neither has to know anything about the other. Text isn't <i>the universal interface</i>, it's just a simple one.<p>You wouldn't stream video data as text, but that's because there are other major factors that make doing so an unreasonable trade-off.