Proposed ASCIIx standard

>>> from lxml import etree
>>>
>>> ASCII_NAMESPACE = 'http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/2011/asciix'
>>>
>>> def ascii_to_xascii(s, pretty_print=True):
...     root = etree.Element('string', nsmap={'ascii': ASCII_NAMESPACE})
...     for c in s:
...         character_node = etree.Element('character', type='integer')
...         character_node.text = unicode(ord(c))
...         root.append(character_node)
...     return etree.tostring(root, xml_declaration=True, encoding='utf-16', pretty_print=pretty_print)
...
>>>
>>> print ascii_to_xascii('Lorem ipsum').decode('utf-16')
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-16'?>
<string xmlns:ascii="http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/2011/asciix">
  <character type="integer">76</character>
  <character type="integer">111</character>
  <character type="integer">114</character>
  <character type="integer">101</character>
  <character type="integer">109</character>
  <character type="integer">32</character>
  <character type="integer">105</character>
  <character type="integer">112</character>
  <character type="integer">115</character>
  <character type="integer">117</character>
  <character type="integer">109</character>
</string>