Better in what sense? I put some thought into this when designing an object serialization library modelled like a binary JSON.
When it got to string-encoding, I had to decide whether to go null-terminated vs length + data? The former is very space-efficient, particularly when you have a huge number of short strings. And let's face it, that's a common enough scenario. But it's nice to have the length beforehand when you are parsing the string out of a stream.
What I did in the end was come up with a variable-length integer encoding that somewhat resembles what they do in UTF-8. It means for strings < 128 chrs, the length is a single byte. Longer than that and more bytes get used as necessary.