as are Ethernet, IP, TCP, and everything else on the lower layers. I would say even say most networking protocols are binary. Some very high level protocols ar

as are Ethernet, IP, TCP, and everything else on the lower layers. I would say even say most networking protocols are binary. Some very high level protocols are not, but in my opinion working with binary ones in applications and libraries is much easier (no need to read an arbitrary amount of bytes and loop through all of them just to find a termination sequence, etc.)