[dcow]

My impression is that crypto people, being mildly allergic to asn.1, decided not to use it to specify standard serialization formats in our new world of EC crypto. So here we are without asn.1 and without a replacement. I generally think if you’re going to remove something because you think it sucks it’s on you to replace it with an equivalent or clearly justify why it was vestigial if you don't have one.

In this case you really don't need a DER calibre encoding either, you just need a standard in the first place. It’s just that the standard would historically likely use asn.1. But that doesn't have to be the case. Maybe the closest thing is the ECDSA point form specified in https://www.secg.org/sec1-v2.pdf#page16. The the curve domain parameters in sec2 are, you guessed it, specified in asn.1.

[johnisgood]

ASN.1 is quite amazing but my only experience with it is through Erlang. The Erlang implementation of it is pretty damn good.