In plain text protocols, the bit stream is organised as a sequence of characters or text strings, e.g. Unicode or ASCII. So the two computers are exchanging textual messages.
Example: number 20020
is represented by five characters (5 bytes).
Pros and cons:
- interoperability between multiple platforms and runtimes that adhere to open and well-known standards: JSON, XML.
- results in larger size messages
- can be easily, inspected, read, debugged