[iridium]

It doesn't hurt that Microsoft is able to hire the best engineering grads, pay them 100k, and convince them that writing documentation for .NET is a better deal than building some pseduo cool product somewhere else at half the pay.

The very small percentage of php developers who have ever had to deal with binary data probably had their hands burnt enough to figure out what binary safe was. While I'm not arguing that documentation should have vague references, its not that hard of a tradeoff between just mentioning something that should be explained over pages, as opposed to not having it there at all.

Plus, the comments section makes it very useful to have examples and clarifications. Its not as bad as you make it out to be.