The 7-bit Internet

Man, not having \n as a statement separator and having to pipe everything through xxd will definitely be a pain.

I don't understand why SPDY / HTTP 2.0 is being framed as "fitting the needs of a few major players".

Google is not the only one who benefits from reduced latency, fast page loads, efficient use of SSL sessions, and server pushed resources.

If anything, the people who benefit the most are those who _can't_ afford massive forward deployed CDN networks, large servers, and fat network pipes.

Amen, OP.

herge: You could also use the "data" program from Hobbit's netcat.

This sounds similar to an argument you could make for writing all of your code in assembly instead of C (or other higher-level languages.) Yes, there's a layer of obscurity between a program written in C and the resulting assembly: a tool (yes, a tool, spouting abstraction all over the place!) called a compiler. As a core tenet of engineering, we create tools that often leverage abstraction in order to let us tackle more complex problems without wrapping our heads around (or writing code to handle) the details.

It's a matter of balance, and we can all choose our own camps along the abstraction ease-of-understanding-every-detail continuum (I'd tend to plop myself toward the former.) Just as we can create a reliable C => assembly compiler, we can create reliable tools to let us leverage abstraction for the better and focus on the bigger picture rather than the smaller.

>At first, this struck me as a very odd thing; text is inefficient, and machines, not humans, are meant to interpret protocols. A binary setup would save bytes—bytes!— and be all-around more manageable by software.

>It wasn’t long, however, before I realized the true genius behind this decision.

This reminded me very much of a talk by Jonathan Blow where he's talking about how he "nerd raged" while reading the Doom source code. He found a section that wasn't optimized, but in fact not optimizing it had so many other benefits (besides, the performance gain would have been negligible). Starts at 14 minutes: http://the-witness.net/news/2011/06/how-to-program-independe...