That suggests things are getting worse but personally I’ve seen the opposite trend.
These days developers rallying around a subset of established standards rather than inventing new protocols and grammar for each new service.
Take a look at the old protocols out there: finger, DNS, Gopher, HTTP, FTP, SMTP Dict, etc. they all have their own grammar and in many cases, even that grammar is very loosely defined or subject to dozens of different standards. Whereas these days it’s mostly JSON or XML over HTTPS. Or ProtoBuf if you need something more compact.
There’s definitely still room for improvement. For example the shift towards proprietary messaging protocols like Slack, Discord, etc. But that’s another topic entirely.
yeah, i appreciate the move to html, http, and json. although http/2 and http/3 arguably aren't really http, and scraping data out of html is ridiculously time-wasting. the shift toward cloudflare and secret criteria for blocking users whose sessions act "atypical" are also huge problems, but that's sort of what you'd expect from using software running on remote servers you can't control
