[mlawren]

Somewhat off-topic, but I had a need recently for a simple serialization format that satisfied the following:

    * Support for undef/null
    * Support for binary data
    * Support for UTF8 strings
    * Universally-recognized canonical form for hashing
    * Trivial to construct on the fly from SQLite triggers

Of all of the formats I looked at nothing matched. So I created Bifcode [https://metacpan.org/pod/Bifcode]. It is a bit of a mix between Netstrings, Bencode and JSON. It is not really human readable, but it is extremely simple and robust, easy to generate and parse, and therefore relatively secure.

I'm not promoting it for any particular use case, and I only have a Perl implementation. Posting here as I think some of the audience in this thread may find it useful.