Right. The problem isn't the text protocol, it's the loose RFCs and implementations. Ultimately, "text" and "binary" are not different things; text is a subset

Right. The problem isn't the text protocol, it's the loose RFCs and implementations. Ultimately, "text" and "binary" are not different things; text is a subset of binary. The difference is that for some reason, many developers wind up allowing human-friendly text protocols to be flexible in terms of parsing. There's no technical reason for this, as a text protocol can easily be defined with requirements just as strict as any binary protocol. I think with HTTP specifically, the problem is that implementations came first. There were already multiple implementations in the wild before the RFCs were written. Thus, the spec was written to accommodate the implementations rather than the other way around.