What About Data Standards? Data standards organizations have been trying for years to eliminate free-formatted text from their data exchange formats, without much success. Certain kinds of information cannot practically be encoded and maintained, either because there are too many values, too many nuances, or because the range of values changes frequently. And although structured data is optimal for system-to-system communication, it is both an unnatural and undesirable way for humans to communicate with each other. This is why most standards provide free-formatted text fields such as: "comments", "remarks", "details", "narrative", "explanation", "history", or "address". Thus, it is extremely unlikely that free-formatted text will ever be completed eliminated from any data standard, no matter how complete or robust. The need for text parsers will always exist.