Meh big deal I used to be able to post to usenet (including moderated forums) and send email from a csh shell sending ascii characters directly to the network interface. Manually playing with a web server isn't much different except the verbosity can be annoying and they don't all play by the rules so you might need more than one cheat sheet. But telnetting into various ports can be a really amusing way to spend a rainy day.
Still, if your gadget does everything you want, then stick with it.
