[twelvechairs]

As nice as Message Pack might be, 'The best way of serialization' I'm not sure is a very helpful statement. It can't be 'the best' because 'the best' depends on the specifics of what you are doing. As noted in the OP: "...its pros and cons should be carefully considered, and there are many situations where it simply does not offer enough advantage...".

I, for instance, am still using the much-less-cool yaml, because I need to reference the same object at multiple points within the same serialization. JSON and (AFAIK) msgpack just dont do that, so in this case there is simply no argument. It took me far too much playing around to figure this out, because the internet is full of "JSON > yaml" and similar broad statements, and very few plain descriptions of what the actual different use cases for each type of serialization might be.

[StavrosK]

Isn't JSON a subset of YAML? So isn't it, quite literally, that YAML > JSON?

[TylerE]

Only if you don't consider having a totally compliant implementations for pretty much every platform a feature. YAML is a big hairy beast.