8th July, 2008
Who remembers IFF nowadays? Google does:
Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages. You can even update your data structure without breaking deployed programs that are compiled against the "old" format.
Skimming a bit the specs it reminds me a lot of the PList system from NeXTSTEP/Cocoa, with an added IDL-like layer on top. Looks like a nice alternative to XML for pure structured data.