Spell

I've had a blast making Weird Web October entries. I have made 26 so far. This is 27. I find the prompt today takes my mind in two directions.

A "spell" is a magical incantation of some kind, to get an effect. And "spell" is a verb: to enumerate the letters of a word in order. Both words make meaning.

I speak English. I write in English too. Human communication often has resiliency. Good spelling is optional.

And misspelling can be intentional. I think of the way Prince wrote lyrics with stylized 2 U. Linton Kwesi Johnson was a musician and poet whose work often used phonetic spelling to represent Jamaican Patois.

It is noh mistri
Wi mekkin histri
It is noh mistri
Wi winnin victri

It is no mystery, we're making history, we're winning victory.

Computers are dumber than people. Or rather, computers are good at different things than people are good at. Humans make meaning. Computers execute instructions. I often misspell the word background in CSS as backgound. When I do this, the resulting web pages contain no background. If I ask my friend what the backgound was when we had that Zoom call, they will understand my error and route around it.

My two favorite canonical misspellings in software follow:

Mod_speling

mod_speling is an Apache HTTP Server module. It is designed to help with misspelled URLs. The name of the module is intentionally misspelled. This is an intentional and witty misspelling of the word "spelling." (mod_speling documentation)

Requests to documents sometimes cannot be served by the core apache server because the request was misspelled or miscapitalized. This module addresses this problem by trying to find a matching document, even after all other modules gave up. It does its work by comparing each document name in the requested directory against the requested document name without regard to case, and allowing up to one misspelling (character insertion / omission / transposition or wrong character).

HTTP Referer

HTTP referer is an optional HTTP header field that identifies the address of the web page from which a resource was requested.

It was misspelled, accidentally, in the original HTTP/1.0 specification, section 10.13 in May 1996. It remains a standard. Misspelled.