Let me tell you a story about one of the funniest mishaps in tech history. Picture this: It's the early '90s, and the World Wide Web is just taking baby steps. Developers were working around the clock, fueled by passion, caffeine, and perhaps the occasional pizza.
Enter the “Referrer” HTTP header. Its job? To tell a webpage where its visitors are coming from. Super useful, right? Well, yes, but here's the fun part. Phillip Hallam-Baker and Roy Fielding, computer scientists, somewhere, during those caffeine-induced coding marathons, misspelled “Referrer” as “Referer” when defining it. A simple typo, but it slipped right through the net (pun intended)!
Now, anyone who has worked in tech knows that once a standard is set, it's often hard to change (just ask anyone still using an old system they swore would be "temporary"). And that's precisely what happened. The misspelled “Referer” header was cemented into RFC 1945, which defined HTTP/1.0 in 1996. The tech world collectively paused, had a good laugh (or cry?), and then moved forward. 🤷♂️
Now, Phillip jokes about getting the Oxford Dictionary to recognize his spelling:
Hey, give me a break, it was eight years ago!
Its like when I did the referer field. I got nothing but grief for my choice of spelling. I am now attempting to get the spelling corrected in the OED since my spelling is used several billion times a minute more than theirs.
The Echoes of the Past in Tech's Present and Backward compatibility
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