[Discuss] A Web Server is No Longer a Web Server

[Derek Martin]

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
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