[bri3d]

ASN.1 was too broad. There is immense value in a more constrained specification that does not include so many hazardous serialization types and antiquated string formats.

Now, should Protobufs or Thrift simply have been constrained versions of ASN.1? I think there is a view of software engineering where this would have been an ideal outcome, but almost universally when we see too-big standards, they are declared "dangerous" and avoided like the plague before they are downscoped.

[cryptonector]

ASN.1 in 1984 was not too broad. It was too simple, and it was too targeted to tag-length-value encoding rules (which are stupid -- TLV is a crutch that is only maybe useful when you lack a compiler, which early on was the case).

ASN.1 today is as broad as it needed to evolve to be because its users needed it.

[oblio]

There is value in throwing away cruft, especially cruft that comes from the IT Middle Ages (before we decided to drop any non 8 bit word sizes, before UTF-8 became the almost universal string encoding, etc.).