With the removal of text mode, the fs documentation was updated to reflect the change, however the http documentation still mentions that it takes the binary argument, without a deprecation warning or anything.

Thanks for the report!

I believe the current documentation is correct, though the difference is rather subtle. Both fs.open and http.request still support a binary mode. However, this doesn't change the encoding of the file or HTTP request, but rather changes .read and .write to use single bytes rather than strings.