That was the web, yeah. Absurdly simple. Now all new protocols are binary and require reading several academic papers instead of a single RFC.

> At that level of abstraction it’s all just strings

Exactly... I worry about the masses learning of this and gaining literacy over the landed gentry.

PHP/CGI basically had it solved. I emulate PHP in .NET6 today using verbatim and interpolated string operations.

Relevant: https://twitter.com/serbantanasa/status/1582019078533046272