There's a lot of alternatives out there. One of the most complete (in terms of specification) and very promising is concise encoding (https://concise-encoding.o

There's a lot of alternatives out there. One of the most complete (in terms of specification) and very promising is concise encoding (https://concise-encoding.org/ https://concise-encoding.org/) which focuses on the duality of editable human compatible representation (as text) and efficient binary encoding/decoding. The biggest issue right now is lack of actual implementations. The project is open source (I'm not affiliated with it).