Google seems to disagree, and this is a main reason HTTP2 uses a proper binary format. And it concurs with my keen experience, having written a proxy and indexe

Google seems to disagree, and this is a main reason HTTP2 uses a proper binary format. And it concurs with my keen experience, having written a proxy and indexer for SIP, which shares most of HTTP's parse design. The simple fact that there's more bytes involved means there gonna be more work. Add to that the inane "human writeable" rules like line folding and it's a mess.