But they are not human readable. They are only readable by humans because can be converted to text with a text reader. For a protocol to be good, it needs decen

But they are not human readable. They are only readable by humans because can be converted to text with a text reader. For a protocol to be good, it needs decent debug tools. Yes I am advocating a binary protocol. If you want to have decent battery life, then you need to be efficient. This is the tradeoff you need to make. for something like text, I really don't understand peoples fear of binary protocols. As an aside clients have memory nowadays, there is no reason to send the full ID for the sender in each message (unless of course you are doing encyption, but even then, once you've exchanged keys its moot) a client needs to keep track of buddies that are online, so this data can be cached, and a local ID used instead.