That was my first thought, too. Why do people forget about good old standards? There are so many attempts to do Binary JSON, Binary XML, Binary YaML, ... whatev

That was my first thought, too. Why do people forget about good old standards? There are so many attempts to do Binary JSON, Binary XML, Binary YaML, ... whatever. Followed by language-specific serialization formats like Python's Pickle, php-serialize, and so on. What a huge mess! If any binary format wants to become a universal competitor to those, it: - should offer some big advantages over the already established ASN.1, and - should be significantly smaller and faster than compression of human-readable formats (e.g. json+gzip or xml+xz)