> There’s only one encoding I choose to acknowledge, which is DER (the Distinguished Encoding Representation, it’s got a monocle and tophat). I also prefer to

> There’s only one encoding I choose to acknowledge, which is DER (the Distinguished Encoding Representation, it’s got a monocle and tophat). I also prefer to use DER, because it is better than BER and CER. DER is actually a subset of BER but BER has some messiness which is avoided by DER; because there are not as any ways to encode data by DER this makes it simpler to handle. DER is also the format used by X.509 certificates, so this is fortunate; however, I use DER for other stuff too (since I think it is generally better than XML, JSON, CSV, etc). I wrote a library in C to serialize and deserialize DER.