[MichaelGG]

I wonder if anyone complaining about binary formats has ever written a high performance parser.

Particularly, HTTP's text format, is a mess. You can continue headers from one line to another. You can embed comments into header values. Seriously. Comments. In a protocol's messages. It's moronic and indefensible. Why anyone would prefer that is probably them thinking that text equals easy to implement or something like that.

[jimktrains2]

I never said HTTP/1.1 is perfect. There are many possible optimizations and fixes possible, of which you've alluded to one.