Any experiences with Protocol Buffers?
<p>I was just looking through some information about Google's <a href="http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/">protocol buffers</a> data interchange format.  Has anyone played around with the code or even created a project around it?</p>

<p>I'm currently using XML in a Python project for structured content created by hand in a text editor, and I was wondering what the general opinion was on Protocol Buffers as a user-facing input format.  The speed and brevity benefits definitely seem to be there, but there are so many factors when it comes to actually generating and processing the data.</p>
<p>Protocol buffers are intended to optimize communications between machines. They are really not intended for human interaction. Also, the format is binary, so it could not replace XML in that use case. </p>

<p>I would also recommend <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON">JSON</a> as being the most compact text-based format.</p>