http wtfs

sockpuppet7

I found this on reddit, and I think it fits this forum:

HTTPWTF

HTTP is fundamental to modern development, from frontend to backend to mobile. But like any widespread mature standard, it's got some funky…

bobjanova

Nice find.

One that it doesn't mention is the shens around redirects - 302, 303, 307 and 308, particularly with non-GET requests.

lolwhat

@bobjanova said in http wtfs:

shens

¿Qué?

Zecc

@lolwhat anigans, I think.

bobjanova

@lolwhat Short for 'shenanigans' yeah. Which you've now made me type out in full anyway.

lolwhat

@bobjanova Oh I see. So it actually was English, just not the Uhmerican vernacular I sling.

Gurth

Referer

(…)

Notably, it's spelled wrong. This was added in the very early days of the web, and the unix spell checker at the time didn't recognize either referer or referrer (the correct spelling). By the time anybody noticed, it was in serious use in infrastructure and tools all over the place, so nothing could be changed and we have to live with every browser request having a misspelled header forever.

Um … support both spellings, maybe? Mark the misspelled version as deprecated but never actually remove it from the spec?

Oh, what do you know?

In the 1997 RFC for HTTP where it defines the parsing rules for content-encoding, it requires all implementations to treat x-gzip and x-compress as equivalent to gzip and compress respectively.

dkf

@Gurth said in http wtfs:

Oh, what do you know?

In the 1997 RFC for HTTP where it defines the parsing rules for content-encoding, it requires all implementations to treat x-gzip and x-compress as equivalent to gzip and compress respectively.

Even better, only gzip works reliably; there's at least one major webserver system that got compress implemented as a third style, deflate, that isn't used because it doesn't recover from error nearly so well. (The names all come from modes of operation of the zlib library.) Which means we're stuck with using the mode of compression that makes the least sense as it has the most uncompressed metadata, almost all of which is unnecessary.