Design has many dimensions; performance is only one of them.<p>Text protocols tend to grow ambiguities, but that&#x27;s because they&#x27;re evolvable.  That&#x27;s a feature, not a bug.  A binary protocol would likely have already collapsed under its own weight.  (Name a binary application level protocol that has achieved adoption as wide as HTTP)<p>HTTP also wasn&#x27;t designed from scratch.  The message format is shared with e-mail (RFC 2822, RFC 822), presumably so people could reuse existing code.  HTML wasn&#x27;t designed from scratch either; it was based on SGML.  There are lots of good reasons that e-mail was text.<p>You&#x27;re basically arguing against nature.  Humans ostensibly design protocols, but it&#x27;s really the laws of evolution and economics (nature) that determine which ones survive.  It&#x27;s like complaining that human knees and backs are fragile... yeah that&#x27;s true, but there&#x27;s nothing you could have done about it.