The Internet is running in debug mode

Yeah, the author calls to re-invent ASN.1, BSON and MessagePack. Something one could expect from a guy that mainly knows Java: lack of experience and knowledge about what is already there. Also lack of understanding why the heck all the protocols are text-based.

I'd like to point out that REST is not something built on top of the Web, it's actually the architectural style on which the Web is based (even though this style has been defined years after the Web was invented). You can have a resource model for your domain and build your own custom RESTful protocol on top of raw TCP/UDP and pick a binary encoding for data transfer.