That&#x27;s still grossly complex compared to the &quot;read a byte, read a length, read <i>length</i> bytes of data&quot; of TLV, and you haven&#x27;t even brought up subtleties like case-sensitivity&#x2F;character encoding and all the &quot;how long can this be?&quot; questions that come with text processing (and the associated opportunities for buffer overflows or DoS&#x27;ing.)<p>Perhaps others mainly think of things like the ASN.1 used in X.509 (and part of TLS) when they hear &quot;binary protocol&quot;, which is at the high end of the complexity scale; but binary protocols can be and often are much simpler.