I don't get all the for-telnet arguments. Who uses telnet for this anyway? I'd bet that 90% of telnet-folk do:
cake:~ mali$ telnet google.com 80
Trying 74.125.235.8...
Connected to google.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.1
.......
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 22:25:02 GMT
Expires: -1
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
At which point they go "oh cool" and go do something else. For the rest of us who use curl, wget, requests, Chrome / Firefox developer tools every day (who are we kidding, it's everyone, you liars! :P), the binary transformation would be transparent.
Hell, if you're going for pure cool-factor, how is pulling out your hex editor less cool? But in reality, you'd never do this.
For a non-standardized and obscure protocol where tooling would likely be lacking, I can see why human readability is a good idea. But we're talking about the very protocol that makes up the fabric of the internet. Seriously, why?
Give me one good reason.
Hell, if you're going for pure cool-factor, how is pulling out your hex editor less cool? But in reality, you'd never do this.
For a non-standardized and obscure protocol where tooling would likely be lacking, I can see why human readability is a good idea. But we're talking about the very protocol that makes up the fabric of the internet. Seriously, why?
Give me one good reason.