[cxseven]

Also, imagine the joules saved worldwide if known key names didn't have to be sent each time, or, better yet, data was packed in a format that optimized for size and processing speed rather than readability.

I mean, I enjoy the idea of human readability as much as Jon Postel, but at certain scales you have to wonder about the hidden cost of petabytes of human-readable data flying over the wire, never to be seen by anything but computers.

[wvenable]

Except that the data stream is, I should hope, compressed so that the data is actually packed into a format optimized for size.

[yitosda]

Not necessarily, and even so not for free.

(Client must specify compression support)

[wvenable]

Most clients support it implicitly; you probably have to go out of your way to get an uncompressed stream. Now compressing a verbose text string is not optimal but given the past attempts I'd hesitate against using a pre-packed format. Historically that has not worked out well. Compressing the text format is ultimately the worse-is-better solution.

[jwilk]

They are using libcurl, for which you need to request compression explicitly:

https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/CURLOPT_ACCEPT_ENCODING.html