Peter Drayton is referring to the binary XML discussion and doubts the longevity of text - precisely, the longevity of the English, German or any other written language and probably even of the Latin characters in particular. Yes, Peter, you are right. In a few hundred years, today's languages will have developed further and will probably result in a single world language that may be more Chinese than anything else.
However, the reason why the Rosetta stone was needed to decode the hieroglyphs wasn't because they were so cryptic, but because even back in the ancient Egypt, the hieroglyph system was only accessible to very few well educated scholars and priests. When the Egyptian empire fell apart, the knowledge just vanished. The fires in the library of Alexandria presumably consumed most of the Egyptian historic records that weren't set in stone. It is fair to assume that the Rosetta stone weren't necessary if the fires never happened. The problem was that hieroglyphs were a closed communication protocol, for which all specs finally (and presumably) were stored at a single place with no backup. In all respects, binary formats are a lot like hieroglyphs. I believe more in plain text, expressed in one of today's predominant character sets.
1:57:55 PM 
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