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
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
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.