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What do you mean by "text based IPs"?

I think he's abbreviating "internet protocols" to "IPs".

He's asking why we have human-readable/text based protocols vs a binary protocol.

aren't they mostly/all binary? as far as i can tell most protos I see just use bits for anything featureful, and text is just text

text-based vs binary. So most of the characters used in the IP are between 0x20 (space) and 0x7E (~), opposed to transmitting binary over the connection.

what do you mean IP?

Only HTTP is text based. TCP, IP, and link-layer protocols are binary.

HTTP is text based because it is a protocol for transferring (hyper)text and so was intended to be human readable like hypertext is.

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