Benjamin,
I should have qualified my comments on ASN.1 a little bit.
Formally, you might have a point, in that ISO and ITU chose to assign
two different standard numbers to the ASN.1 abstract syntax and the BER
encoding rules.
But in practice, it is impossible to practice ASN.1 for standardized
interoperation without using one of the encoding rules, and that means that
BER is as much part of ASN.1 as the P1 protocol is part of X.400.
Therefore, claiming that ASN.1 and BER are not related is not useful.
Thanks for your comments!
Harald A