Best practice for data encoding?

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch at muada.com>]

I was wondering:

What is considered best practice for encoding data in protocols  
within the IETF's purview?

Traditionally, many protocols use text but obviously this doesn't  
really work for protocols that carry a lot of data, because text  
lacks structure so it's hard to parse. XML and the like are text- 
based and structured, but take huge amounts of code and processing  
time to parse (especially on embedded CPUs that lack the more  
advanced branch prediction available in the fastest desktop and  
server CPUs). Then there is the ASN.1 route, but as we can see with  
SNMP, this also requires lots of code and is very (security) bug  
prone. Many protocols use "hand crafted" binary formats, which has  
the advantage that the format can be tailored to the application but  
it requires custom code for every protocol and it's hard to get  
right, especially the simplicity/extendability tradeoff.

The ideal way to encode data would be a standard that requires  
relatively little code to implement, makes for small files/packets  
that are fast to process but remains reasonably extensible.

So, any thoughts? Binary XML, maybe?

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