I agree completely --- they look &quot;human friendly&quot; but parsing them is a huge pain. A simple binary protocol, while not as easily human-readable (but that&#x27;s what hex dumps are for), could be just as extensible without all the ambiguity. It doesn&#x27;t even have to be something as complex as ASN.1; a similar sort of TLV-based protocol would fit the use case very well. E.g. [1 byte request method; 2 bytes URL length; variable-length URL; [1 byte header name; 2 bytes header data length; variable-length header data] 0 terminator]<p>On the bright side, at least IP, TCP, etc. weren&#x27;t designed in the same way...