Yesterday IMG tag history came up, prompting a memory lane wander. Reminding me that in 1992-ish, pre `www.foo` convention, I'd create DNS pairs, foo-www and foo-http. One for humans, and one to sling sexps.
I remember seeing the CGI (serve url from a script) proposal posted, and thinking it was so bad (eg url 256-ish character limit) that no one would use it, so I didn't need to worry about it. Oops. "Oh, here's a spec. Don't see another one. We'll implement the spec." says everyone. And "no one is serving long urls, so our browser needn't support them". So no big query urls during that flexible early period where practices were gelling. Regret.
Not the person you're responding to, but I think they mean sexps as in S-expressions [1]. These are used in all kinds of programming, and they have been used inside protocols for markup, as in the email protocol IMAP.
Yes. Not quite a decade before JSON and YAML, what's at hand for a human-readable interchange format for nested data? SGML (no XML yet), something FORTH-ish, make up your own thing, and...? Contemporary WAIS (search as a distinct non-HTTP protocol) shrugged off human-readable, and tried nightmarish binary ASN.1.
I remember seeing the CGI (serve url from a script) proposal posted, and thinking it was so bad (eg url 256-ish character limit) that no one would use it, so I didn't need to worry about it. Oops. "Oh, here's a spec. Don't see another one. We'll implement the spec." says everyone. And "no one is serving long urls, so our browser needn't support them". So no big query urls during that flexible early period where practices were gelling. Regret.