RFC 2616 is dead

179 points by felixrabe 11 years ago | 15 comments

wpietri 11 years ago |

I had a faint hope that they'd fix "referer". Alas, no: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-5.5.2

josai 11 years ago | |

I have a proposal in place to replace the single referrer with an array of all preceding referrers, to track through multiple redirects, etc. The header name would be "referer's"

wolf550e 11 years ago | | |

I don't know what's worse: the privacy implications, the bandwidth implications or using the apostrophe to mean "here comes an s". Nice trolling.

NelsonMinar 11 years ago | |

I believe their intent was not to creat new protocols.

gjm11 11 years ago | | |

Note for readers who may not have noticed: the above is a rather clever joke. See, e.g., http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/10893/what-did-ken-t... for background.

barosl 11 years ago | |

So true. I'm occasionally confused on which spelling to use. My rule of thumb is using "referrer" for almost all place including variable names, except for the situation when I have to manipulate the headers directly.

notatoad 11 years ago | | |

i've finally got my brain wrapped around to believing that referer is the correct spelling within the context of HTTP. Any time i need to talk about a referer, it's spelled referer. if it's spelled referrer, it must mean something else.

oneeyedpigeon 11 years ago | | |

If I've learnt anything in programming, it's that inconsistent naming just adds useless complexity. At some point, you'll find yourself having to map from 'referrer' to 'referer'; that's entirely wasted effort. Wherever possible, name everything (variables, array indices, filenames, database fields, HTML input names) exactly the same.

steveklabnik 11 years ago | |

That would be backwards incompatible.

rquantz 11 years ago | |

Presumably any such fix would have to start with specifying both a referer and a referrer header, so that legacy clients wouldn't freak out. That said, it's humbling to think that because someone made a mistake in, what, 1991? We still have to go around spelling referrer wrong all the time, and even include the incorrect spelling in new specs.

So, all you standards proliferators out there: used the goddam spell checker, all right?

btgeekboy 11 years ago | | |

For what it's worth, Wikipedia notes:

"[D]ocument co-author Roy Fielding has remarked that neither 'referrer' nor the misspelling 'referer' were recognized by the standard Unix spell checker of the period."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer

ehPReth 11 years ago | |

I hope they strip out "referers" or "referrers" in the future, but somehow I doubt that will happen

contingencies 11 years ago |

I would go a step further and say the IETF is dead ... so many of the new protocols are basically just after-the-fact corporate interests fronting up and publishing.