Still, you pay a one-time cost of reading the manual, then the ongoing benefit of using a nicer UI. With cURL you pay the one-time cost of reading its manual, b

Still, you pay a one-time cost of reading the manual, then the ongoing benefit of using a nicer UI. With cURL you pay the one-time cost of reading its manual, but also pay the ongoing cost of dealing with its unintuitive, verbose, and generally less human-friendly UI. JSON encoding is a sensible default these days for a tool to be used by humans, though I agree there's a good "principle of least surprise" argument for defaulting to plain HTTP POST. It would also be nice if it had a setting between "interpret response as JSON" and "uglify the response", but OTOH those additional formats are good opportunities for user-contributed patches.