I don't think that the concept of ASN.1 is as bad as Jeff makes out. If it worked then ASN.1 would be very very usefull. But is just plain don't.
ASN.1 is worse than useless, it means that a very good idea is rendered unusable because of a baddly botched implementation.
I'm not familiar with ASN.1 except for the occasional short piece in various books. But i was under the impression that it was similar to the language used to define TCAP and ROSE standards. These standards are reasonably well defined. I've gotten to the point where i get annoyed when working with protocols that treat everything like abitrarily organized bits and bytes (like NA Cellular protocols and PGP). So, would use of the language used to define TCAP and ROSE applications be a possibility? I've occasionally thought about developing such a protocol for PGP. allen