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Why is HTTP / 2 binary, and HTTP 1.1 text? In my opinion, they are both binary, because the computer does not have artificial intelligence and does not understand the text as such.

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  1. A binary protocol is a protocol which is intended to be read by a machine rather than a human being, as opposed to a plain text protocol such as IRC, SMTP, or HTTP. Binary protocols have the advantage of terseness, which translates into speed of transmission and interpretation.

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_protocol

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  2. Ultimately everything a (non-quantum) computer holds in its memory is expressed in binary. This very sentence is stored as bits in some SQL server somewhere in a data center.

    However, some bytes can be expressed as characters, while others can not. A textual format (such as source code files or other plaintext file formats) will be entirely human-readable, because all its bytes compose characters.

    This is different for a binary format. Binary is not meant to be human-readable, so if you’d open an HTTP/2 stream in a text editor such as Notepad, you’d see a lot of question marks or black squares.

    That’s because HTTP/2 uses compression, and compression urges to make the most use of all available bits, while text doesn’t.

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