Talk:HTTP referrer

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Would it not make more sense to spell the word correctly across the majority of this page, apart from where necessary to highlight the mistake? Andrewferrier 14:16, 2004 Oct 23 (UTC)

I think the intention in not doing so was to imply (somewhat justifiably) that "referer" is, although historically a mistake, now the "correct"/"accepted" spelling for this usage. Essentially, "referer" and "referrer" have become different words, and this article is only about the first of them. This is, of course, a rather descriptivist take on the situation... - IMSoP 19:30, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Phillip Hallam-Baker, the original proposer of the referer field and most likely the person most likely for the spelling has made this exact argument, that his spelling is now the most commonly used and thus is now the 'correct' one.

I think it's cool that Referrer redirects to a 'common misspelling' of itself. :) - ulayiti (talk) 22:36, 16 February 2006 (UTC)


Contents

[edit] Requested move

The following discussion is archived. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
Move approved by consensus--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 17:00, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

HTTP referer → HTTP referrer — move proposal for discussion already took place. — Voidvector (talk) 12:18, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Survey

Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with *'''Support''' or *'''Oppose''', then sign your comment with ~~~~. Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's naming conventions.

[edit] Discussion

Any additional comments:

Someone moved this page without discussion to "referrer" and removed all mention of the spelling "referer", for no apparent reason other than personal preference. I just reverted this. It is important to understand that the spelling "referer" is not simply jargon but the spelling actually used within the HTTP protocol itself, as well as all official standards documents. The spelling kind of irks me too but at this point it is deeply embedded in the fabric of the Web. It would be misleading to spell it differently, especially for those people who are writing programs manipulating it. Redquark 02:35, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

I would prefer the correct spelling, because
  • it is a “referrer”
  • DOM spells it correctly: document.referrer
  • RFC 2616, the HTTP 1.1 standard, says: the "referrer", although the header field is misspelled. So even the HTTP standard says it’s a “referrer”, but obviously they cannot name it like that because it would break backward compatibility. They could also have named the header field “ref”, but would that mean it’s not a “referrer”? No.
– 91.4.21.49 (talk) 15:18, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
I support this. Worth a move request. --Monk (talk) 22:59, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
I would also support moving to correct spelling, and clearly note the misspelling usage in HTTP protocol.--Voidvector (talk) 12:08, 11 November 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose. This clearly appears to be the way it was spelled. It's like if you name your son Thom and then find out later that Tom is spelled without an "h". [1] uses "referer", and notes that it isn't a correctly spelled word. I can remember when Data General had a spell check program but didn't want to release it to the public for lack of a good word list. It had the fatal flaw that after you spell checked a document you could hit one key to dump all the misspelled words into the dictionary. It had programmer spelled with one m, two m's, and three m's. So the folks who created the Internet couldn't spell. Big deal. 199.125.109.59 (talk) 04:05, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
  • Support per the HTTP standard 76.66.192.6 (talk) 05:11, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

[edit] Rewrite

I've just rewritten the Derefer section, Wikipedia does not need a list of dereferer services. The concept of this dereferer appears to be altering the HTTP header defining the referring URI, so I've put in a concise section explaining the whole thing and mentioning dereferer. I've also removed all the external links, as none of them were very relevant to the article and looked like link spam. --Draicone (talk) 07:22, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

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