[cryptonector]

It's really not an advantage that DER can be "parsed" without a schema. (As compared to: XDR, PER, OER, DCE RPC, etc., which really can't be.) It's only possible because of the use of tag-length value encoding, which is really wasteful and complicates life (by making it harder or impossible to do online encoding, since you have to compute the length before you can place the value because the length itself is variable length so you have to reserve the correct number of bytes for it and shoot-me-now).

[woodruffw]

I don't have a strong opinion about whether it's an advantage or not, that was more just about the claim that it can't be parsed without a schema.

(I don't think variable-length-lengths are that big of a deal in practice. That hasn't been a significant hurdle whenever I've needed to parse DER streams.)

[cryptonector]

Variable length lengths are not a big deal, but they prevent online encoding. The way you deal with that anyways is that you make your system use small messages and then stream those.