No love for the binary formats? Let's hear it for ASN.1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASN.1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASN.1), so good that google can reinve

No love for the binary formats? Let's hear it for ASN.1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASN.1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASN.1), so good that google can reinvent it as protocol buffers (http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers) and get people interested. More seriously, yes, binary formats have their problems. And ASN.1 in particular suffered/suffers from being pre-unicode (and thus having a number of different + mostly useless character set types). But it seems to me that this nested tag-length-value structure (ASN.1 and protocol buffers) occupies a design sweet spot.