[pdimitar]

ASN.1 has an amazing idea and an awful implementation. :(

I'd say standardise a subset of ASN.1's binary and text representations and introduce a completely different schema syntax -- LISP seems like a sane choice -- and just stop there.

ASN.1 suffers the same problems that many other technologies suffer: they have way too many things accumulated on top of one another. Somebody has to put their foot down and say: "NO! Floating-point numbers in these binary streams can be 32 bit, 64 bit and arbitrary precision but no more than 1024 bits! I don't care what you need, there's the rest of the world to consider, deal with it". And people will find a way (maybe introduce a composite type that has 2x 1024-bit floats).

We need standard committees with a bit more courage and less corporate influence.