I see where you're coming from, I had a similar experience playing with HTML as a kid. That said, "compiling" HTML from text to an efficient binary format would

I see where you're coming from, I had a similar experience playing with HTML as a kid. That said, "compiling" HTML from text to an efficient binary format wouldn't have prevented browsers from including those compilers themselves and transparently compiling all plain text pages received. Newbies could keep on serving plain text HTML (until someone chastises them for it) while the web as a whole would benefit from the increased efficiency that comes from binary pages being the norm. Your argument doesn't really apply at all to HTTP, though. No one "got their start" peeking at HTTP requests. It's solely the domain of those working on infrastructure (for some definition of that word). Anyone with any idea of what HTTP really is (ie more than "that thing at the start of a URL") should have no problem using a tool to convert between a binary and text representation of the protocol. It's not like you can just magically pull HTTP requests out of the ether, you need a tool anyway. There's no reason why curl (for example) couldn't transform a request you write into an equivalent binary protocol, or why it couldn't do the inverse operation when it receives the response. It's utterly ridiculous to me that there is such inefficiency in HTTP just to make things slightly easier on the implementers of curl and wireshark.