[breck]

I think you've explained the situation quite well.

I got my career started helping a lot of big companies transition from SOAP/WSDL/XML tech to JSON APIs in the late 2000's (writing API servers and client libraries in PHP, Ruby, Python, and then Node.js) and so thought about these technologies day in and day out for many, many years.

I think we are still missing a dead simpler way to do it all—a very basic Tree/Grid Notation where API requests and responses are equivalent to sending a spreadsheet back and forth (no syntax characters—no quotes, ticks, brackets, parens, etc—just spacing for the encoding). Higher level types would be added onto that, but at the low level it's all about just keeping your data as simple and clean as possible.

Here's a demo I made in 2014 of the idea, which I think is as relevant as ever https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV4Nv23bBwQ&t=4s

And another look at it: https://treenotation.org/#apis

[merb]

> Higher level types would be added onto that, but at the low level it's all about just keeping your data as simple and clean as possible.

and at the end we would call it rpc and gave the binary protocol a better name, like protobuf or cap'n'proto?

[breck]

All RPCs would take a tree notation doc as input and return a tree notation doc as output. Tree notation supports no data structures and tree notation supports all data structures. Apis would use only the data structures they need. Binary protocols would be easy to optimize.