X-Clacks-Overhead

All of those are thanks to the EU.

Totally pointless garbage that further train "Click OK" behaviour (after decades of Microsoft's existing conditioning) and enable malicious parties to take advantage of that behaviour.

Yeah, that's one of the worst cookie notices I've seen in a while, no reject button for what is essentially a page of Markdown.

In addition snarky wording which I can't work out if I hate more than the faux caring "oh you don't mind if we use cookies do you?" language.

FWIW You can use uBlock origin to remove ##.alert-dismissible.alert-info.alert from the page to avoid having to deal with it.

Same. No project of mine has ever missed this.

I always insert it (with permission from the owner, of course) in the sites that I manage, just as a little gesture. It's bit like that ASCII duck saying "meow!" on Amazon.

Forgotten, no. Dead, yes.

Not ancient, but optical telegraph systems were a thing.

> The most widely used system was invented in 1792 in France by Claude Chappe, and was popular in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph

You mean deprecated. It also only applies to the creation of new parameters, not to existing ones.

Ehh. IMO there's still a place for them in extensions that it would make no sense to standardize - this is one example (I hope nobody attaches any behavior to this); a more common one is application-specific headers that aren't generic enough to ever have meaning outside of interop with that one application.

IIRC it appeared there first, though not by long as is spread PDQ.

It's possibkle Pratchett meant it as an intentional reference to the other GNU, but if it was he never told anyone.

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Terry Pratchett, is in fact, GNU Terry Pratchett, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Terry Pratchett.

I think it's too specific an acronym to be a coincidence, and if you read "Going Postal", it's a pretty clear love letter to the hacker culture, so in my mind officially recognized or not, the connection with FSF is there

Damn, do you really have to be like that about a clever little tribute to a beloved author?

He would have had the beginnings of dementia at the time of writing the book, please cut him some slack.

All those ... 50 bytes or whatever it is, yes.

If you want to pick a fight about bandwidth waste, start with spam, not this.

> the whole Internet would soon be completely bogged down with useless overhead packages filled with spam and ads

I’d love to be on your internet where this isn’t already a reality

Yeah, and imagine if libraries really twisted the universe enough to create routes between different places and times. So unrealistic. The man just had no idea about shelf architecture and gravitational physics.

Ahem.

You are aware he was writing fantasy with a referring-to-real-life comedy bent, not specifications & instruction manuals, aren't you?

The point of the "GNU" flags is that they're an unforeseen exploit of the system. The technology in Discworld is intentionally convoluted and whimsical because it is a fantasy setting with humerous overtones (while also using that setting to deliver biting commentary on real-world issues at times, I suppose "a little bit of sugar helps the medicine go down"). The fact the flags spell out GNU is also an obvious tribute to the free software movement (as is arguably the hacker subculture of clacks operators that builds around the clacks in the novel).

Yes, if the Internet worked on the clacks protocol, it wouldn't work in real life. But neither would cameras if they relied on small creatures living in them and painting the photographs very quickly. It's not even that Discworld is horribly naive, it's more that it served as a whitewashed canvas to allow him to create narratives by introducing elements of the real world individually and give the reader the opportunity to draw parallels from that.

The clacks "GNU" hack is a perfect example of the kind of things you'd see in the early Internet days before commercial websites were really a thing. Remember that for a long time there was a dream of the "semantic web" which turned out to be similarly exploitable and fell apart when commercial interests became relevant (giving birth to what we now call SEO).

The X-Clacks-Overhead header is clearly not intended to behave like the clacks in the story. Nobody is naive enough to believe that this protocol would work (just as the semantic web didn't). It's entirely a tribute, a form for fans to (at least temporarily) "immortalize" someone who had a great influence on them. And unlike the twenty different analytics and ad scripts you now find on many websites it not only wastes hardly any space but also doesn't meaningfully inconveniece users (not any more than forgetting to turn of the server and x-powered-by headers at least).

This sentiment is what is removing - day by day - the soul of the world wide web.

Not everything is about efficiancy gains - it's ok to just have fun. The internet never has been serious business, nor will I (or many others) ever treat it as such.