5 ms·
The reason HTTP is ASCII based isn't because it's easier to debug. It's because back then the other end was as likely to be a human as a piece of software. Beca
by zaarn 5y ago
The reason HTTP is ASCII based isn't because it's easier to debug. It's because back then the other end was as likely to be a human as a piece of software. Because HTTP in it's early days barely had headers or even formatting, so people typed "GET /" at the server directly or used the same method to send mail directly.
Nobody does that anymore and debugging is easily solved by converting your binary protocol to a textual form.
- throw0101a 5y agoI question the ascertain that humans were doing "GET /" or "HELO my.fq.dn" on any regular basis. There were mail clients from the very beginning for example: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email Perusing document-based information was also done via clients, first with Gopher and then with the WWW: either GUIs like Mosaic, or on the CLI via (e.g.) Lynx.
- zaarn 5y agoI would question if this weren't the case often enough that people would demand it be compatible with their teleprompter.
- michaelmior 5y agoI definitely did back in the day :) But I'm only one single human.
- lmilcin 5y agoI did both send mails over SMTP as well as downloading files from FTP using Telnet.
- jbverschoor 5y agosame
- choeger 5y agoI don't think this is about human readability (albeit it might be to some extent during the design phase). Instead, I think this was the sensible thing to do when byte order was way more variable across a network. If you only send single bytes to begin with, you can as well use a textual format, IMO.