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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

IRC is IMHO an example of a good text-based protocol design, along with several of the other early Internet application-layer protocols (POP, SMTP, HTTP); usable manually with nothing more than a netcat terminal, but also by more fully-featured clients. Early versions of MSNP had a similar flavour, before Microsoft decided to bloatedly XML-ify and SOAP-ify it.

Also, can we please stop using the word "modern" in everything? It's essentially meaningless. At least the name of the page doesn't have it.

Example: I have a book titled "Modern Welding" on my bookshelf (or, as others have called it, "Modem Welding", which partly explains why it's there...), whose copyright date is 1965.

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"Also, can we please stop using the word "modern" in everything?"

I am using a text-based browser and so I do not use the upvote/downvote javascript. Consider this comment an upvote.

The increasingly pervasive attachment of the word "modern" to software descriptions in recent years is confounding. I thought maybe it was annoying only me but apparently not.

Sometimes I have thought it could be a manifestation of cognitive dissonance arising from the realization that in software, in most cases, "there is nothing new under the sun".

Honestly I do not understand where it comes from or what it means. Is it some sort of marketing buzzword?

Can't speak for software but in the case of these specs, 'Modern' in the title pokes fun at the fact that the core protocol specifications most people refer to are around 25 and 18 years old, respectively. RFC 1459, very commonly referred to and still the first reference for a lot of IRC software authors, came out before I had my first birthday!

> I am using a text-based browser and so I do not use the upvote/downvote javascript. Consider this comment an upvote.

I haven't tried, but looking at this page source it looks to me that vote arrows are divs wrapped in anchors pointing to up- and down vote URLs. They should definitely be usable without JS; maybe the problem is that the empty divs are not visible in your text browser?

Correct. They are not visible.

I could convert these anchors into visible URLs and they should work. Nevertheless I will not be doing that.

When I mentioned JS I was thinking of the presence of the onclick attribute and the vote() function as seen below.

In regards to your second point, it is a web page rather than a book, and it states that it is intended as a living document.

IRC has changed a lot over the years, and this is an attempt to document the subset of the protocol that is currently being used in most implementations (hence the "modern" title).

MSNP was a neat little protocol. Messages were sent as mime messages. They did have a max message size, but the official client would ignore any headers it didn't know about and any mimetypes it wasn't expecting. This gave third-party clients a lot of ability to extend the protocol. For instance, I hacked in avatar support in Gaim (aka Pidgin) when I was maintaining that support.

MSNP8 is when all the terrible MSNSLP (MSN SLP-Like Protocol) stuff began, with the binary packets. Spent a couple months figuring out the content of those packets... And while avatars were part of the protocol at this point, custom content was no longer as viable. I can understand some of the reasons they wanted to change it, but in the end, I think they ruined a decent (if imperfect) protocol.

>IRC is IMHO an example of a good text-based protocol design

Though it would have been nice if there was an actual text encoding specification. Right now, various networks, especially in Asia, have all kinds of funny encodings going on. Meanwhile in US and European contexts, UTF-8 isn't standardized, so you have to expect other encodings as well.

I for one am waiting for the Post-Modern or New-Modern IRC Client Protocol. Modernism is just so dated these days. /s

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