The Internet is running in debug mode. Because it's large and complex and humans have to debug the problems. Humans need to be able to read the data as it whizz

The Internet is running in debug mode. Because it's large and complex and humans have to debug the problems. Humans need to be able to read the data as it whizzes by to spot the problem[1]. Often, this needs to happen in environments with minimal tooling; e.g. you're staring down a problem on a production server, and you're forbidden to install the newest analysis script and its requirement of the latest version of Python. We've already agreed on a binary protocol: UTF-8 (previously it was ASCII.) But we've also built redundancy into it for the humans to make sense of it with their high-level brains. Instead of a single byte representing an HTTP header, we use a string of bytes. Now the human involved can tap the wire and watch the request in real-time without processing anything. Now, if you'd like to remove redundancy without the need for a compression library, we'll just need to agree on shortening those strings. And we'll need a new diagnostic/parsing tool for each [binary] protocol that's invented -- unless you can convince the grep/sed/awk developers to add every protocol to their tools. Or maybe we could all agree on a single binary encoding for every potential combination of strings; something like an index into a dictionary. It might be better (i.e. higher compression ratios) if we let the computer decide on the dictionary for each message. Do you see where this is headed? 1 - This, of course, is only the case until the machines can accurately gauge human intent and respond appropriately, preventing us from making mistakes to begin with.