Today, in the (in)famous newsgroup de.alt.sysadmin.recovery, there was a discussion on how to represent binary data through XML. This is my proposal:
<machineword width="XX" endianness="big|little|middle">
<bit significance="0" encoding="number">0</bit>
<bit significance="1" encoding="text" language="en">one</bit>
<bit significance="2" encoding="text" language="de">null</bit>
</machineword>
Erhard Schwenk posted an even more bloated proposal, which can be found under the MsgID <
3FCE3A5D.1050702@fto.de> (at the time of writing not yet online).