Wouldn't it have been cool if there were an efficient binary format and a nice human-readable and human-editable format, with a well-defined transformation from one to the other?
Back in the 1990s, Ron Rivest came up with canonical S-expressions, which are fully capable of representing the same information represented by HTML, XML, ASN.1—but can be either human-readable or binary.
Here's a simple example: (p (* class (footer x-treme)) "This is a " (b "footer") "."). Very human-readable, very human-editable, and easily machine-readable, wouldn't you agree?
As a binary format, it would be (1:p(1:*5:class(6:footer7:x-treme))10:This is a (1:b6:footer)1:.). Still geek-manipulable, if necessary, and extraordinarily simple to parse. And it has the advantage that it is a distinguished encoding--any of the myriad human-readable encodings all reduce to the same canonical encoding, which has advantages for hashing.
Back in the 1990s, Ron Rivest came up with canonical S-expressions, which are fully capable of representing the same information represented by HTML, XML, ASN.1—but can be either human-readable or binary.
Here's a simple example: (p (* class (footer x-treme)) "This is a " (b "footer") "."). Very human-readable, very human-editable, and easily machine-readable, wouldn't you agree?
As a binary format, it would be (1:p(1:*5:class(6:footer7:x-treme))10:This is a (1:b6:footer)1:.). Still geek-manipulable, if necessary, and extraordinarily simple to parse. And it has the advantage that it is a distinguished encoding--any of the myriad human-readable encodings all reduce to the same canonical encoding, which has advantages for hashing.