Once everything becomes encrypted you're going to need specialized tools (Wireshark) for debugging anyway, so does it matter whether the inside is text or binary?

Also, efficient formats/protocols need to use byte counting, and byte-counted "text" protocols (BEEP and bencode come to mind) are effectively human-unreadable anyway.

Yeah, I've got no problem with binary protocols, especially when they need to encapsulate arbitrary data (e.g. containing NULLs, etc). Just keep the protocol design sane and it's trivial to write a pretty printing trace tool. Requiring machine-to-machine communication to do heavy parsing is a bad idea.

> Requiring machine-to-machine communication to do heavy parsing is a bad idea.

Why? Machine-to-machine communication is for machines, after all, isn't it?

What you call "heavy parsing" is heavy parsing for humans. It's actually easier for machines, because they simply reference (and verify) an offset.

Are you advocating designing a protocol primarily around how easy it is to interactively troubleshoot? Certainly that has value, but on the modern Internet, is it really the dominating concern?

To the point:

- try checking what a webapp does. TRIVIAL. We're talking minutes.

- try checking what a binary app on your computer does. one with DRMs or advanced "anti crack" stuff for example. FREAKING HARD. Even if you're a wizard, it still takes a few hours. For mortals, we're talking weeks. Weeks!

And that my friend, is why what you wrote is wrong.

Definitely not the case with HTTPS, which looks like binary garbage over the wire but whose payload is quite transparent once decoded by SSL.

How are you "checking what a webapp does"?

You're using the browser or WireShark almost guaranteedly. You can continue to use the same methods with SPDY or compressed/proxied SPDY.