No. The reason people use text based formats is so that they could be read by humans without additional tools. Compression reduces the size but it's not reasonable to claim it works better then a binary format designed for light footprint.
Joe also made a funny comment on that if you listen to his talk. He said how "People say ASCII is good because you can see what's on the wire. Well can they see electrons bouncing up and down the wire? They see what a program chooses to let them see"
