Many, many years ago I picked up a book about a standard used in the telecommunication industry for describing and encoding data. The standard was called Abstract Syntax Notation 1 or ASN.1. Using this, data structures could be described and encoded in a standard way for transmission. This should sound familiar - if not you only have to click here.
This was so long ago that I can't remember who wrote it and also seem to have lost my only copy.
Then in the January 2004 issue of IEEEPro, I was surprised to read an article by Darren Mundy and David Chadwick ("An XML Alternative for Performance and Security: ASN.1") in which they showed that using ASN.1 binary encoding is significantly faster than using XML encoding. Using this the data can be described using ASN.1 (analog to XML Schema) and encoded using a standard ASN.1 binary encoding . (Unfortunately only the abstract is publicly available.)
This seemed a Good Idea, especially in enterprise environments were performance is important. However, the idea has not escaped others, as I found out when I came across this news article about speeding up XML. This references the Fast Infoset project which (you've guessed it!) uses the ASN.1 standards and encodings.
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