To illustrate what I mean, consider the old coding for eathena:
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<layer name="Collisions" width="200" height="130">
<data encoding="base64" compression="gzip">
H4sIAAAAAAAAAO2Z2Y7dOAwFM/f/P3qQBwOGI8laSB7KKgIFTDq3tZCn7O7M7/fnzw8AAAAAAAAAAAA+xb1WPgOwMxGlviNAL+pS3x+gRNZS9wXOZpdS9wnOYsdS9wzOYOdS9w6+x9dK3U/4Dl75VJe6r7A/Xy91f2EfTi91/yEvX6/eO6rnALmg/i31TEDPzhVxB...
Consider the following alternative for a small 10 by 10 map
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<layer name="Collisions" width="10" height="10">
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxx----xxx
xxx----xxx
xxx----xxx
xxx--xxxxx
xxx--xxxxx
xxx----xxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
...
The practical benefit,
1. It makes it very easy to fix mapbugs in textformat if you know where to look.
2. It makes it a lot easier to copy parts of maps when one map overlaps the other.
3. Experienced mappers can even map entirely from texteditor.
The downside of course would be that the mapfiles become a lot larger, but I don't know whether this increase in length would really cause any problems, since textfiles don't really take up much space.