This kind of encoding[0] is ubiquitous in networking protocols. It scales down to small silicon well and enables the receiver to estimate resource requirements

This kind of encoding[0] is ubiquitous in networking protocols. It scales down to small silicon well and enables the receiver to estimate resource requirements or skip parts of a serial byte stream without storing it in memory first. These encodings usually aren't aligned by design. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type–length–value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type–length–value