Human-readable

Human-readable refers to the representation of information primarily intended for reading by computers. A prolific example is the bar code, where the bars of the code are almost always accompanied by a numeric equivalent which humans can check or type by hand if necessary. In the case of bar codes used in stores, laws frequently mandate that a human-readable price be displayed with the merchandise, rather than relying solely on the machine-readable bar code and price disclosure only at the point of sale. In computing specifically, the phrase human-readable refers to data that is stored in a format easily read by most humans - normally as ASCII-encoded text, as opposed to binary data. Note that any data format at all can be parsed by a suitably-programmed computer; reasons for choosing binary formats over text formats have usually centered on issues of storage space (a binary representation usually takes up fewer bytes of storage) and ease of reading back into a computer program (no parsing is necessary). However, with the advent of well-specified, structured markup languages such as XML, and the decreasing costs of data storage, compromises between human-readability and machine-readability are now possible.