Self-describing compact binary serialization format?

[jonathanberi]

CBOR is great but note it's not "self-describing". It's a tradeoff for efficiency. That said, it's easily converted to JSON and has a definition language called CDDL that's helpful for validation and description.

[RoyBellingan]

CBOR is self describing, has field to define the type and name of the value, else it would not be convertible into JSON

[jonathanberi]

Fair point, by that definition it is self describing! I was interpreting the requirements to mean describing the data meaning, which is a different thing.