Comments by John Gilmore. Theodore Ts'o, and Steve Ksnt are useful
guidance for some of us who are about to plunge into this morass.
I have no personal experience with ASN.1 per se, but I would agree that
some of the allegedly "useful" definitions in X.521 and elsewhere leave
a lot to be desired. Date and time are two excellent examples, where a
Julian date and time-of-epoch approach are quite a bit more compact.
Going throuch all of the overhead of ASN.1 is useful if it allows you
to use a strongly typed definition of a compact representation, but
using it to encode a human-readable text representation seems a bit
bizzare.
Bob