I believe you are correct, mainly because the basic purpose of the protocol is "no parsing", so therefore it must work when loaded directly into RAM. The spec

I believe you are correct, mainly because the basic purpose of the protocol is "no parsing", so therefore it must work when loaded directly into RAM. The spec is a bit confusing though, because of the statement that "Strings are simply a vector of bytes". The way I understand it is that a string is a vector FOLLOWED BY a null terminator. The spec should probably say that rather than the current wording. This would appear to be necessary so that a string can be treated as either a vector like any other (with the correct number of elements) and can also be accessed directly by a (char *) pointer without things going awry. Disclaimer: I haven't read the whole spec yet; this is my off-the-top-of-my-head interpretation and I may have misunderstood it completely.