devilish, I once came across where someone had accidentally written a FSM that used http redirects as the transitions between nodes. All to animate a progress bar for a job queue. It was so ridiculous it honestly took me longer than I care to admit to understand what I was seeing, who the hell expects to see that?

OTOH, we have a codebase at my current employer that opens up a TCP socket to a service and passes pipe delimited strings. And you know what? I give the thumbs up to that. Why? The service it's communicating with is an old C++ service that was written around the time that XML started coming onto the scene. That's how you did things back then and it works perfectly fine, albeit it's probably not the most familiar to younger developers.