> To stress a point from my last article, text based protocols (not just JSON) have the fundamental flaw that buffer signalling is all ‘in band’, that is, to fi

> To stress a point from my last article, text based protocols (not just JSON) have the fundamental flaw that buffer signalling is all ‘in band’, that is, to figure out where a piece of data ends you must read all of it looking for a particular character sequence While this is indeed a drawback of many text-based protocols, there's no fundamental connection between it and being text-based. Many binary protocols and formats have the same drawback. Conversely, netstrings [1] don't require scanning for delimiters, escaping any special byte values, or special behavior for netstrings-within-netstrings. They could easily be used as the basis for a text protocol (and probably have been, somewhere; BitTorrent uses something similar but not identical, mixed with delimited fields, and not text-only). [1] https://cr.yp.to/proto/netstrings.txt https://cr.yp.to/proto/netstrings.txt