[elcritch]

The IETF has made a bunch of standards lately like COSE for doing certificates and encryption stuff with CBOR. It’s largely for embedded stuff, but I could see it being a modern alternative. I haven’t used it myself yet.

CBOR is self-describing like JSON/XML meaning you don’t need a schema to parse it. It has better set of specific types for integers and binary data unlike JSON. It has an IANA database of tags and a canonical serialization form unlike MsgPack.