[cryptonector]

> Realistically if ASN.1 weren't as badly overengineered and had shipped only with some of the more modern of it's encoding formats we probably would all be using ASN.1 for man things including maybe your web server responses and this probably would cut non image/video network bandwidth by 1/3 or more. But then the network is overloaded by image/video transmissions and similar not other stuff so I guess who cares???!???

ASN.1 was not over-engineered in 1990. The things that kept it from ruling the world are:

- the ITU-T specs for it were _not_ free back then

- the syntax is context dependent, so using a LALR(1) parser generator to parse ASN.1 is difficult, though not really any more than it is to parse C with a LALR(1) parser generator, but yeah if it had had a LALR(1)-friendly syntax then ASN.1 would have been much easier to write tooling for

- competition from XDR, DCE/MS RPC, XML, JSON, Protocol Buffers, Flat Buffers, etc.

The over-engineering came later, as many lessons were learned from ASN.1's early years. Lessons that the rest of the pack mostly have not learned.