ASK HN: Why are so many IP's text based?

#1

Post by vjoshi » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 12:35 AM UTC

No post body was provided.

Re: ASK HN: Why are so many IP's text based?

#2

Post by detaro » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 12:42 AM UTC

What do you mean by "text based IPs"?

Re: ASK HN: Why are so many IP's text based?

#3

Post by vjoshi » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 12:49 AM UTC

detaro wrote: post #2

What do you mean by "text based IPs"?

text-based vs binary. So most of the characters used in the IP are between 0x20 (space) and 0x7E (~), opposed to transmitting binary over the connection.

Re: ASK HN: Why are so many IP's text based?

#4

Post by pki » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 1:13 AM UTC

vjoshi wrote: post #3

detaro wrote: post #2

What do you mean by "text based IPs"?

text-based vs binary. So most of the characters used in the IP are between 0x20 (space) and 0x7E (~), opposed to transmitting binary over the connection.

what do you mean IP?

Re: ASK HN: Why are so many IP's text based?

#5

Post by chainsaw10 » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 1:17 AM UTC

detaro wrote: post #2

What do you mean by "text based IPs"?

I think he's abbreviating "internet protocols" to "IPs".

He's asking why we have human-readable/text based protocols vs a binary protocol.

Re: ASK HN: Why are so many IP's text based?

#6

Post by pki » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 1:41 AM UTC

chainsaw10 wrote: post #5

detaro wrote: post #2

What do you mean by "text based IPs"?

I think he's abbreviating "internet protocols" to "IPs". He's asking why we have human-readable/text based protocols vs a binary protocol.

aren't they mostly/all binary? as far as i can tell most protos I see just use bits for anything featureful, and text is just text

Re: ASK HN: Why are so many IP's text based?

#7

Post by informatimago » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 2:41 AM UTC

As you can see clearly from the 5 previous answers, the reason why is obvious.

Re: ASK HN: Why are so many IP's text based?

#8

Post by Perdition » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 4:17 AM UTC

vjoshi wrote: post #3

detaro wrote: post #2

What do you mean by "text based IPs"?

text-based vs binary. So most of the characters used in the IP are between 0x20 (space) and 0x7E (~), opposed to transmitting binary over the connection.

Only HTTP is text based. TCP, IP, and link-layer protocols are binary.

HTTP is text based because it is a protocol for transferring (hyper)text and so was intended to be human readable like hypertext is.

Re: ASK HN: Why are so many IP's text based?

#9

Post by vjoshi » Mon, Sep 28, 2015, 8:25 AM UTC

informatimago wrote: post #7

As you can see clearly from the 5 previous answers, the reason why is obvious.

I was looking at this from more of an 'efficiency' perspective actually. Text-based protocols have a bit of an overhead as they require sending more data to transmit the same amount of information. So what benefits outweigh this?

After a bit of digging, it does appear my question itself was incorrectly phrased. But it seems to be that the majority of internet traffic use text based protocols. There are many more binary protocols than text but more text traffic than binary. Thus most of the successful protocols on the internet are text based. Except for a small number of applications (bittorrent is one example) binary protocols tend to die.