Google has an elegant solution for this in the form of protocol buffers, which are human-readable when expanded but compress down to a very efficient binary for

Google has an elegant solution for this in the form of protocol buffers, which are human-readable when expanded but compress down to a very efficient binary format: https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/ https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/ Unfortunately it was made public only after JSON had already become "the XML replacement".