| Those who don't understand history are doomed to misinterpret its lessons. Do you remember the OSI binary protocols as designed back in the day? ASN.1 as far as the eye could see. OIDs. MIBs. Loosely defined extensibility. Terrible, complex protocol designs. This had nothing to do with the protocols being binary or text; the protocols themselves were painfully complex, making it difficult and frustrating to write a working implementation, much less a complete and interoperating implementations. > ... at this layer the efficiency does not pay off (i.e. the size of the HTTP header leading that 5MB image does not really matter). "I don't care about RTT time, the lack of bidirectional communication, and the inability to inline binary data in the protocol stream" ... said no mobile/wireless/desktop developer, ever. > One of the comments here pulled a comparison I did not remember any more: SS7 vs SIP. I've implemented SIP. It was a massive hassle because it was text-based and annoying and difficult to parse. The available SIP libraries tend to be buggy and incomplete, and people actually pay for workable SIP stacks. I'd rather not look at SIP ever again. That isn't to say SS7 is better, it doesn't appear to be. As far as I can tell, that's because it was badly designed, not because of a flaw inherent in using binary encodings. |
+1
http://www.igvita.com/slides/2013/breaking-1s-mobile-barrier... if you want to read about this from a mobile perspective.