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0 pointsjacquesm11y ago0 comments

Referrer was a nice idea that led to a lot of trouble. Agreed, that wasn't the most brilliant idea but in a world of one-way-links a way to establish the origin of incoming traffic so you could simulate reciprocal links must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

Keep in mind that Hypertext as it was originally envisioned by Ted Nelson had nothing but two way links, doing one-way links broke with the view of the day in a pretty drastic manner (and actually made the whole thing possible), so I think some leeway here is allowed.

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4 comments · 1 top-level

kmowery11y ago· 3 in thread

I believe they were referencing that in English it is "referrer", but has been misspelled in HTTP forever as "referer".

jacquesmOP11y ago

Well, in this draft linked here they spell 'server' as 'sever' in one instance so I guess that evens up the score. But the GGP had a point, referrer is a troublesome bit in many ways and he seemed to be aware of the spelling error so I chose to answer the meat of the item rather than to take it in the most simplistic way (after all, making spelling errors like this really does happen, one guy I knew had sandblasted 150 glass doors with a text when I happened to walk by and pointed out that pneumatical has an 'n' in the second position (and not an 'm'...). For some reason he didn't seem all that happy.

fpgeek11y ago

The score most certainly not even. HTTP is still way, way behind. There's a qualitative difference between a spelling error in the document describing the protocol and a spelling error in the protocol itself. In my opinion, the substantive point wasn't about the mechanics of referrers, but that the lack of care and attention to detail demonstrated by "Referer" is strong evidence that HTTP is not as elegant as you claim.

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Dylan1680711y ago

> the meat of the item

Imaginary meat. Sure, you can talk about the implications of the actual header, but you must first acknowledge that this has nothing whatsoever to do with the context of 'elegance'.

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