I agree 100% on binary being a bad idea in HTTP spec, largely because of encoding and going backwards. But also binary and fixed lengths lead to harder to stre

I agree 100% on binary being a bad idea in HTTP spec, largely because of encoding and going backwards. But also binary and fixed lengths lead to harder to stream situations, chunked problems and being less approachable which leads to less innovation I believe. I'd argue HTTP clients/servers are better at dealing with buffer overruns because it isn't so set to a fixed length and more based on better defensive content messaging. Many of the complaints on HTTP are really complaints about MIME messaging which the entire internet is really built on (standards anyways) and has ran pretty smoothly for a very long time. Approaching improving HTTP by addendum like SPDY is a better idea. Or possibly transporting it better over streamed protocols like SCTP: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6525 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6525 no need to modify the packaging/messaging format. MIME/HTTP/HTTPS are very flexible and if you want binary can be added in and has been in multipart, EDI/HTTP/AS2 and other RFCs use this. Multipart isn't used as much because it is more problematic (used heavily in email and custom protocols) so making the whole spec that way would be bad overall. The points on the OSI layers is very key, let's not revert to binary + base64 everything just to get data across the wire. You can put anything in there, basing it in text and human readable is always a good idea. That is really what this whole layer is about. Binary type of movement pushes us back to the days of non standard blobs, problems that http messaging then content as xml then json solved by standardizing readable exchange of data. When you are exchanging data in a standard way it should be very basic to minimize problems not collude. Throwing out all of MIME just to speed up HTTP when other protocols exist for any needs that are faster (real-time, attaching files, streaming etc) is a bad idea. Also changing support from HTTP < 1.0, to 1.0 to 1.1 had many problems, unless this adds considerable benefit, changing it adds more problems.