Google has, at last, open... (07 Jul 2008)
Google has, at last, open sourced Protocol buffers. My, very minor contribution to this is that I wrote the basis for the encoding documentation.
Protocol buffers pretty much hit the sweet spot of complexity and capability. (See XML and ASN.1 for examples of attempts which missed.) I have the beginnings of a protocol buffer compiler for Haskell that I wrote for internal apps. Now that the C/Java/Python versions are out, I should probably clean that up and put it on Hackage. But every coder should consider protocol buffers for their serialisation needs from now on.