[Cryptography] encoding formats should not be committee'ized

[Lodewijk andré de la porte]

IMO readability is very hard to measure. Likely things being where you
expect them to be, with minimal confusing characters but clear "anchoring"
so you can start reading from anywhere.

If someone could write a generative meta-language we can then ask people to
do "text comprehension" tasks on the packed data. The relative speeds of
completing those tasks should provide a measure of readability.

I don't like anyone arguing about differences in readability without such
empirical data. (it's all pretty similar unless you design against it I
guess)

XML is actually surprisingly readable. JSON is a lot more minimal. I find
its restrictions frustrating and prefer using real JAVASCRIPT OBJECT
NOTATION wherever possible, like INCLUDING FUNCTIONS and INCLUDING 'THIS'
REFERENCES. Harder on parses, but why would you write your own anyway? (No,
your language is not archaic/hipster enough not to have a parser for a
popular notational format!)

I think that's the most useful I have to say on the subject.
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