Over the years I've come to like HTTP. It's mostly text-based, but you can send arbitrary binary data through it. The request-response pattern is a decent match

Over the years I've come to like HTTP. It's mostly text-based, but you can send arbitrary binary data through it. The request-response pattern is a decent match for a world where most computers have no clue where they are, need help learning their own IP address, and are stuck behind trapdoor firewalls anyway, so the only really usable case is to reach out to a well-known server at a well-known address and ask it to do something. Of the whole web stack, HTML is the only part I've consistently hated since the big web revolution that started around 2007. It's just such a piece of shit. JS got faster and TS redeemed it substantially. HTML still sucks.