ASN.1 is not quite "binary format that include the specification in the format itself". There are multiple formats of ASN.1, such as DER, which is a binary format which includes the structure and type specifications (except implicit types) with the data. I think DER is better than many other formats, and I use this for some of my own programs. This does not necessarily mean that you will know what the use of the data is (but CSV, JSON, etc won't do that either), but the structure and some of the data types can be decoded.