EDN ain't half bad, true. It addresses some of the JSON shortcomings (like: lack of comments) and is still readable and easy to parse. And I have to agree with ASN.1 middleware - most of it is old and of low quality. But this can be said about pretty much everything that's been around before the ubiquitousness of the Internet (i.e. when developers assumed good faith and hacking wasn't even a topic to be discussed).
And yes, some of the X- encodings for ASN.1 should die in flames (alongside XML in general; flames are welcome ;>). It's still a pretty neat binary format if one uses BER though. But when it comes to binary formats, I really like everything IFF-like. It's similar to ASN.1 in terms of how data is structured, but uses far simpler rules for headers and payload. It's much harder to botch the implementation.
And yes, some of the X- encodings for ASN.1 should die in flames (alongside XML in general; flames are welcome ;>). It's still a pretty neat binary format if one uses BER though. But when it comes to binary formats, I really like everything IFF-like. It's similar to ASN.1 in terms of how data is structured, but uses far simpler rules for headers and payload. It's much harder to botch the implementation.