> "What is a better option for the conveying of platform-independent > data than ASN.1 or XML?"
A somewhat-flippant answer would be text strings and numbers expressed as strings. But what ASN.1 (or BER) and XML seem to be trying to do is to permit the export and later import of essentially arbitrary C structs in a manner that will be portable across processor architectures. /sys/src/libsec/port/x509.c seems to be mostly concerned with ASN1 and it's 2,559 lines long, and that's short compared with the openssl ASN1 routines, which total 16,071 lines in my copy. So why not /lib/ndb format: textual attribute=value pairs with grouping?
