ASK HN: Why are so many IP's text based? - vjoshi
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informatimago
As you can see clearly from the 5 previous answers, the reason why is obvious.

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vjoshi
I was looking at this from more of an 'efficiency' perspective actually. Text-
based protocols have a bit of an overhead as they require sending more data to
transmit the same amount of information. So what benefits outweigh this?

After a bit of digging, it does appear my question itself was incorrectly
phrased. But it seems to be that the majority of internet traffic use text
based protocols. There are many more binary protocols than text but more text
traffic than binary. Thus most of the successful protocols on the internet are
text based. Except for a small number of applications (bittorrent is one
example) binary protocols tend to die.

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detaro
What do you mean by "text based IPs"?

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vjoshi
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.

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Perdition
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.

