One of the biggest mistakes the Internet made was trying to make HTTP do everything.

@atomicpoet it's not the programmers fault. They had no choice. I was one of them.

In the early naughties we tried developing systems that connected on other ports and spoke different protocols.

But our corporate users could not use them. They were on networks locked down by paranoid security engineers.

Only port 80 was allowed. Or port 443.

So we had to rewire it to fit where corporate security firewalls allowed.

And thus, paranoid security engineers forced everyone to make everything look like web traffic. Which of course makes the whole system less secure.

@pre @atomicpoet this is exactly the drive from things like CORBA IIOP and RMI to SOAP and eventually REST. But there were other reasons...these could all be forced onto any port. What they couldn't do is go through a proxy that's going to strip off the TLS ans replace it with dynamically generated certs so the SOC can fully observe it.