[osth]

"What happened to simple protocols?"

Answer: The Internet is still running on them, 30 years later.

Whenever I read something like "simplicity is hard", it makes me cringe. I hear that a lot, and I see evidence of gratuitous complexity everywhere I look these days. I'd hazard a guess the engineers behind SDPY would find simplicity (and reliability) boring.

Debugging binary protocols is either great job security for over eager engineers like the SPDY team or a great waste of our collective time. I'll let you all decide which.