While on the topic of encodings (I'm a huge encodings geek), let me plug a new one we recently discovered called Space (https://github.com/nudgepad/space). It is dead simple and has the nice feature that it is extraordinarily easy for both humans and machines to read and write.
It is definitely very minimalist. Personally I have issues parsing it visually though, because the indentation of only one space makes it hard to differentiate inner data structures particularly on a large screen with small fonts. Additionally the lack of a division character other than space between the key and the value makes reading each key value pair much harder because the key and value tend to run together visually.
