[TheOtherHobbes]

Nothing is inherently a stream of bytes. If all you have is a stream of bytes without a context, you have absolutely no idea what it's supposed to be and no clue how to do anything useful with it.

The whole point of OP is that it should be easy - or at least possible - to access contextual meta-information. Because this makes it easier to to build tools that work with meaning automatically instead of relying on unreliable, partial, and/or broken manual context handling based on unstated or implied assumptions.

[gpderetta]

You can certainly have a decent idea of what information is there by just looking at the bytes and reverse engineer the protocol. This is how unix pipelines are composed as a matter of fact.

Now, of course it would it be better if each program formally described the schema of its output and the system provided tooling to act on this information, but being able to string together uncooperative programs via their common denominator (i.e stream of bytes), is powerful and the unix way.