On Sat, Oct 25, 2025 at 07:23:03AM -0700, Kent Borg wrote: > A system designed for hypertext has turned out to be the > architecture for so much of modern life, but it wasn't designed for > that.
It's probably really a semantic argument, but I mostly disagree with this characterization. There are a bunch of pieces of "a system designed for hypertext," but most of them are either specific to hypertext (e.g. HTML) or necessarily common (e.g. server hardware), so I'll focus on HTTP, which I think is what you meant anyway. >From the beginning, HTTP was designed to transfer all manner of data, borrowing heavily from MIME, in response to arbitrary user requests specified either heirarchically, as in GET requests, or free-form, as in POST requests with arbitrary request body contents. The protocol was, even in the first version (though obviously improved in subsequent versions) adequate to handle such requests at a fairly high rate of speed, and never required involvement of hypertext whatsoever, even if that was originally the predominant form of data served at the time. As it happens, HTTP adequately provides facilities to build arbitrary application interfaces (I resist calling them APIs, even though everyone else does) for server applications that handle requests from client applications with arbitrary requirements and allowing arbitrary requests and arbitrary responses as necessary. Nothing designed by humans is perfect, but it's pretty good. But then, I work for a large internet company which designs such things using such interfaces... HTTP is my hammer. =8^) On Sat, Oct 25, 2025 at 01:23:52PM -0700, Ron wrote: > The term "serverless" has a meaning beyond "no server": Bah. I could say it has no meaning, or at best it has different meanings depending on who is saying it, and in what context, all of which are unintuitive and unimaginative, and for all of which it is a misnomer, and the claims made about which may best be described as "unreliably truthful." It's marketing gobbledygook. Just like "the cloud" before it. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
