One big influence was HTTP. You really need to consider HTTP as part of the serialization. HTTP led to XML over HTTP and then JSON over HTTP. Then came HTTP/2

One big influence was HTTP. You really need to consider HTTP as part of the serialization. HTTP led to XML over HTTP and then JSON over HTTP. Then came HTTP/2 to and then gRPC. Would it be better if we still send HTML over ASN.1? I think the state of things would be much worse.