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for-GET
know-your-http-well
Emacs Lisp2013–2025
for-GET / know-your-http-well

know-your-http-well

HTTP headers, media-types, methods, relations and status codes, all summarized and linking to their specification.

Developer ToolsWeb DevelopmentData & DatabasesLearning & ReferenceCreative & MediaNetworking
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
6Distinct people
14Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

HTTP headers, media-types, methods, relations and status codes, all summarized and linking to their specification.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year14 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-09-07 10:06:52 UTC to 2025-07-09 15:05:32 UTC.

01232013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

14 sources
troupo·Jul 9, 2025
> but the HATEOAS detail ends up having no practical value and creates more problems than the ones it solves. Only because we never had the tools and resources that, say, GraphQL has. And now everyone keeps re-inventing half of HTTP anyway. See this diagram https://raw.githubusercontent.com/for-GET/http-decision-diag... (docs https://github.com/for-GET/http-decision-diagram/tree/master...) and this: https://github.com/for-GET/know-your-http-well
In Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful
troupo·Dec 28, 2023
> REST in practice just means following HTTP semantics. If that were true, it would be awesome. Because full HTTP semanics are quite intricate, and cover a lot - HTTP decision diagram: https://github.com/for-GET/http-decision-diagram (full docs: https://github.com/for-GET/http-decision-diagram/blob/master..., just the PNG: https://camo.githubusercontent.com/c26df6d372790e9f24d7e16d2...) - Know your HTTP well: https://github.com/for-GET/know-your-http-well
In It's time to put REST to rest
bmn_·Oct 19, 2015
> people spend so much time debating what is and what isn't REST should be a red flag that maybe it isn't the answer to everything Does not follow. People spend so much time debating what is and what isn't REST because there are a great number of people who do not understand the topic, have no actual interest in learning it properly, and then come to wrong conclusions and start making wildly inaccurate arguments. Not all Web application problems can be cleanly modelled over REST, so indeed it is not the asnwer to everything, but most can. For those that can, using the REST architectural style is more advantageous than, let's say, remote-procedure calling. > All the simple REST examples make it look like it is the perfect solution for CRUD tasks. All the simple REST examples are written by those ignorants I mentioned above. The simple CRUD
Read the rest
model falls apart when there is just a little more complication involved. REST does not mean just CRUD, as any decent REST book teaches. > If the server returns 404 for a resource, what actually happened? Did the web server or my application return the 404. ⁇ If the server returned 404, the server returned 404. This means the client application/the user agent made a mistake, indicated by the leading digit 4. > Conflating HTTP and application error codes leads to confusion. When following REST, that conflating is actually a good practice. Not doing so means tunnelling a proprietary, possibly ad-hoc protocol over HTTP, resulting in non-interoperability. There is no need for any confusion, the response body can deliver a precise problem description applicable to the concrete error condition, perhaps even giving an indication how to fix the problem. There is a wealth of status codes <https://github.com/for-GET/know-your-http-well/blob/master/s... and many of them semantically map to typical application error states, and it's okay to fall back to generic codes like 422 or 400. > HATEOAS is just superfluous. […] I just haven't found a practical use for it. You need to bring a better argument to the table. Establishing relations between and traversing resources using links and other hypermedia controls is central to the REST architectural style. Every Web browser does this, for timbl's sake! > REST encourages creating a CRUD interface for every single resource. Not true. Nothing in REST encourages this. It's the software architect's fault if there are 100 (supposedly underutilised) resources, not the fault of the architectural style.
In Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST

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