>HTTP2 is one of those 'version 2' of an app that some of the legacy genius of it was lost and overlooked in the redesign, like simplicity. Calling HTTP1/1.1 g

>HTTP2 is one of those 'version 2' of an app that some of the legacy genius of it was lost and overlooked in the redesign, like simplicity. Calling HTTP1/1.1 genius sounds like an "intelligent design" argument (as opposed to "evolution"), and I think detracts from what makes it good. What makes more sense to me is HTTP1/1.1 was invented and then we hacked/adapted/"evolved" on top of it to get it to do what we want. It wasn't the spec that was genius - it was the effort of countless engineers overtime the crammed a genius, trillion dollar industry into an "okay" spec (The same way it was done for HTML/CSS/JS). in that vein, the whole binary/plaintext header arguments seem a lot closer to "this is the way my father did it" rather than "this is the most efficient way". To counter your XML/JSON example - I would argue they won over binary formats because there a huge need for humans to write & edit data exchange structures. OTOH, I can't remember the last time I sent/edited/created HTTP Headers by hand. While JSON has tons of uses and is stored in countless places(config, user data, state data), HTTP servers are the only services that seem to care about HTTP headers.