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by IshKebab
1833 days ago
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This is all 100% correct but he missed probably the biggest reason! It's really really hard to write an unambiguous text protocol specification and equally hard to write something that implements it properly. Think about all the extra ambiguities text adds: where is whitespace allowed? How are newlines encoded? Are windows line endings ok? Does case matter? Which bits are ASCII and which are UTF-8? How are values quoted? It's just insanely more complicated, and there are many subtle differences that seem reasonable to different people. "Of course whitespace is allowed there!" It makes everything way less robust and way more prone to quirks-mode style degradation. |
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sigh Those are not "Windows line endings". CRLF has been used as a line-delimiter in every single ASCII-based network protocol since 1971 to this day. UNIX is not the single progenitor of every thing in the modern computing, not by a long shot.