[zzo38computer]

I would agree that binary formats can be much better. Sometimes you can use fixed fields, but there are also structured formats such as DER (which is generally better than JSON in my opinion). JSON has many problems, including that it does not have a non-Unicode type (so you must use base64 encoding or hex encoding instead and that isn't very good), and other problems. Parsing it will also mean that you must handle escaping.