I think it is. We have a large amount of tooling in existence to inspect text based formats. Binary format inspection requires new tooling to be written and d

I think it is. We have a large amount of tooling in existence to inspect text based formats. Binary format inspection requires new tooling to be written and deployed. This is a major barrier. I may be a bit old-school, but I learned HTTP via telnet, a tool definitely not written to inspect HTTP, and I still use it when I’m trying to debug things. Not having to install tooling is still something I take advantage of. Obviously binary formats can and do succeed, and with sufficient backing tools will be written and deployed. But if HTTP hadn’t been so easily inspect-able I don’t think it would have been nearly as successful the 1st time around, when the benefits of the protocol where less well known. And I do think some of the "culture of the protocol" will be lost moving to binary°. It just isn’t as hacker-friendly or at least newbie-hacker-friendly and that sends a message. - ° Of course this is already happening with HTTPS, so this is probably not a winnable fight. And the benefits of binary formats are significant, so it might not even be a fight I want to win. Still something is being lost here.