Text vs Binary Protocol

The distinction between protocols that encode messages as human-readable ASCII or UTF-8 text versus those that encode messages as compact binary data. Text protocols such as HTTP/1.1, SMTP, and FTP are easy to inspect with tools like telnet or Wireshark and require no special decoder. Binary protocols such as HTTP/2, gRPC (Protobuf), and DNS wire format are more compact and faster to parse but require protocol decoders to interpret. Binary protocols dominate high-throughput microservice communication where serialization speed matters.