Hacker News Reader

Comment by commandersaki | Hacker News Reader

I love dict/dictd but I had an issue using it in hostile networks that block the port/protocol.

I've been tempted to revamp dict/dictd to shovel the dict protocol over websokets so I can use it over the web. Just one of those ideas in the pipeline that I haven't revisited because I'm no longer dealing with that hostile network.

View on HN

The dict protocol really show it's age, notably the stateful connection part. Having a new protocol based on HTTP and JSON similar to LSP would be nice but there is no real interest. (I made and used my own nonetheless in a research project. It may even be deployed but desactivated in another one)

This biggest issue isn't technical, it's the fact organizations having dictionary data don't want third-party to interact with it without paid licensing.

I hate the fact that corporate IT collectively decided to block every port except 80 and 443, making it necessary to base new protocols on HTTP instead of TCP/IP.

In my experience HTTP is a better foundation for novel protocols in most cases.

Doesn't HTTP require binary data to be converted to base64 encoding, thereby increasing its size on the wire? That seems suboptimal for a lot of use cases

It does not - you are perhaps thinking of GET queries: URL data often must be base64 encoded as URLs are parsed as characters.

HTTP bodies can be made up of any data in any encoding you wish.

no, it does not, neither in requests nor in replies. possibly you are thinking of smtp

> possibly you are thinking of smtp

You're right, I definitely was

There is always wiktionary, I would assume they have an api of some sort. That would cover the http & json bit!

https://wiktionary.org

There's not a specific Wiktionary API, just the general Mediawiki stuff

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Amgine/Wiktionary_data_%...

> Having a new protocol based on HTTP and JSON

This is just a HTTP/REST api? These exist already.

Might be something LLM based for organization knowledge base

Reply on news.ycombinator.com