1. Introduction

1. Introduction

There are hundreds of standardized formats for binary representation of structured data (also known as binary serialization formats). Of those, some are for specific domains of information, while others are generalized for arbitrary data. In the IETF, probably the best-known formats in the latter category are ASN.1's BER and DER [ASN.1].

The format defined here follows some specific design goals that are not well met by current formats. The underlying data model is an extended version of the JSON data model [RFC4627]. It is important to note that this is not a proposal that the grammar in RFC 4627 be extended in general, since doing so would cause a significant backwards incompatibility with already deployed JSON documents. Instead, this document simply defines its own data model that starts from JSON.

Appendix E lists some existing binary formats and discusses how well they do or do not fit the design objectives of the Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR).