[pquki4]

JSON is usually used for front end-back end communication or public API endpoints, otherwise protobuf/Thrift/Avro is commonly used in the backend for internal services (that is controlled by one organization), for very good reasons. Same for HTML -- you need to thank HTML for being able to read hacker news frontpage on a 10 year old kindle with a barely usable browser. I suggest you look all these up before complaining about nothing.

[klysm]

I don’t think it’s very good reasons. We could definitely have binary first serialization protocols and good tooling built into the browser. But no, we encode everything as text, even binary stuff as base64, and whack that into strings

[pquki4]

There is nothing preventing anyone to build a whole new set of infrastructure for such "binary first serialization" 20 years ago, 10 years ago or today. We don't even need to do that much. Instead of "text/html" or "application/json", let's just use some binary format in the request headers everywhere and make both the client and server support it. Why hasn't that happened?

It's for the same set of reasons, and people aren't dumb.

[geraldwhen]

All of those are slower than json in many contexts. JSON parsing and serialization is very fast!

[klysm]

In what context is json slower than protobuf?