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HTTP/1.1 is so simple that I can just open up netcat and ask a webpage from a website by hand. And this is not even my field. Now, you can also build a lot of

HTTP/1.1 is so simple that I can just open up netcat and ask a webpage from a website by hand. And this is not even my field. Now, you can also build a lot of complexity upon it. And while the simplicity is nice for inspecting and debugging sometimes, in practice it is rarely used, and it's a very complex beast with TLS, SSL, gzip compression and more. The arguments are similar to binary logs vs text logs. Except that in HTTP's case, it is already littered with binary.

cogman10 5y ago
The case for "http is simple" similarly falls apart when you realize that a lot of tools for diagnosing http streams can just as easily (easier in fact) consume a binary stream and translate it into a human readable form as they can analyze the text form. We don't complain that we can't read our browser's binary but for some reason everyone is convinced that our transport protocols are different and it is imperative to be able to read it with a tool to translate it.