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I hate the fact that corporate IT collectively decided to block every port except 80 and 443, making it necessary to base new protocols on HTTP instead of TCP/IP.

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In my experience HTTP is a better foundation for novel protocols in most cases.

Doesn't HTTP require binary data to be converted to base64 encoding, thereby increasing its size on the wire? That seems suboptimal for a lot of use cases

It does not - you are perhaps thinking of GET queries: URL data often must be base64 encoded as URLs are parsed as characters.

HTTP bodies can be made up of any data in any encoding you wish.

no, it does not, neither in requests nor in replies. possibly you are thinking of smtp

> possibly you are thinking of smtp

You're right, I definitely was

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