[fabricode]

I don't believe a tl;dr is necessary for this short article.

I enjoyed reading through his thought process for designing a simple protocol which is:

  * Easy to use (requiring little/no additional libraries)
  * Easy to extend (simple keyword/value extensions)
  * Immune to changes in technology
  * (above all) easy to understand

[jacques_chester]

Yet he himself says he considered and rejected a binary protocol for the reason I gave: "I considered using a binary format, but the immediate problem was having extendable fields.", going on to point out that he rejected Thrift because it was too new and ASN.DER because it was too big.

That said, I think he didn't want a binary format in any case -- his "doing it again today" remarks point to JSON.