But one of the beautiful features of TCP is that it has the properties necessary to treat it as a text stream -- you can build text-based protocols on top of it

But one of the beautiful features of TCP is that it has the properties necessary to treat it as a text stream -- you can build text-based protocols on top of it. Since troubleshooting an application-level protocol seldom requires you to delve into the TCP-level, it works very well in practice. The HTTP 2.0 draft not only makes the application-level protocol binary, but it eschews the simpler stream metaphor in favor of replicating a bunch of that TCP-level complexity in the higher layer. There are reasons for all of this, of course -- it's not being proposed on a lark. But it does have a very real complexity cost.