The availability of a minimal yet highly functional, fully-specified core language offers many opportunities to improve data quality. One of the most important will be an open reference implementation, the design and source code of which are underway. A freely-available reference implementation in turn makes automated validation suites possible. These suites can improve data quality by reporting syntax and semantic differences among implementations, preferably before release. A reference implementation taken together with the guidelines for readers and writers in this paper should make it possible to write software that conforms to a very high level of precision, regardless of programming language or paradigm. Given verified implementations, performance optimizations can be considered. The existence of a core language specification should also aid standardization efforts, either for Balsa itself, or SMILES. Finally, the development of better line notations is only possible given a thorough understanding of the scope and limitations of existing options. Here, metaformats could offer a bridge from the present to the future.