> Yes, we like being able to see protocols in the clear since it makes debugging and tracing easier. But text based protocols are also more error prone and open up for much more parsing and parsing problems.
> If you really can't take a binary protocol, then you couldn't handle TLS and compression in HTTP 1.x either and its been there and used for a very long time.
First, you can have the best of both worlds of fixed-sized frames and human readability: make sure each HTTP keyword has a finite, short length. ASCII abbreviations are an acceptable means to this end. This would also eliminate a lot of the implementation difficulties and performance penalties of writing and using a parser.
Second, TLS and compression are not integrated into HTTP/1.1, meaning that people who want to be able to read an HTTP stream on the wire can do so by disabling these features. It's disingenuous to claim that people don't care about human readability just because these extensions exist.