There are a couple I have in mind. Like many techies, I am a huge fan of RSS for content distribution and XMPP for federated communication.
The really niche one I like is S-expressions as a data format and configuration in place of json, yaml, toml, etc.
I am a big fan of Plaintext formats, although I wish markdown had a few more features like tables.
The biggest problems with gRPC are:
Plain HTTP can be type safe. Just publish JSON schema or Typespec files or even use Protobuf.
Am I the only one who is weirded out? Requiring a web server for something and then requiring another server if you want it to actually work on the web?
How expensive do people want to make their deployments?
Your concerns are all valid, but about 1 and 3 there are possible solutions. I’m using Rust+Tonic to build an API and that’s eliminate the necessity of proxies and it’s very simple to use.
I know that it don’t solve all problems, but IMHO is a question of adoption. Easier
toldtools will be develop for it.