> the whole Internet would soon be completely bogged down with useless overhead packages filled with spam and ads

I’d love to be on your internet where this isn’t already a reality

When I read that I thought OP was being sarcastic, but sadly from the rest of the message he isn't

Yeah, and imagine if libraries really twisted the universe enough to create routes between different places and times. So unrealistic. The man just had no idea about shelf architecture and gravitational physics.

Ahem.

You are aware he was writing fantasy with a referring-to-real-life comedy bent, not specifications & instruction manuals, aren't you?

Damn, do you really have to be like that about a clever little tribute to a beloved author?

The point of the "GNU" flags is that they're an unforeseen exploit of the system. The technology in Discworld is intentionally convoluted and whimsical because it is a fantasy setting with humerous overtones (while also using that setting to deliver biting commentary on real-world issues at times, I suppose "a little bit of sugar helps the medicine go down"). The fact the flags spell out GNU is also an obvious tribute to the free software movement (as is arguably the hacker subculture of clacks operators that builds around the clacks in the novel).

Yes, if the Internet worked on the clacks protocol, it wouldn't work in real life. But neither would cameras if they relied on small creatures living in them and painting the photographs very quickly. It's not even that Discworld is horribly naive, it's more that it served as a whitewashed canvas to allow him to create narratives by introducing elements of the real world individually and give the reader the opportunity to draw parallels from that.

The clacks "GNU" hack is a perfect example of the kind of things you'd see in the early Internet days before commercial websites were really a thing. Remember that for a long time there was a dream of the "semantic web" which turned out to be similarly exploitable and fell apart when commercial interests became relevant (giving birth to what we now call SEO).

The X-Clacks-Overhead header is clearly not intended to behave like the clacks in the story. Nobody is naive enough to believe that this protocol would work (just as the semantic web didn't). It's entirely a tribute, a form for fans to (at least temporarily) "immortalize" someone who had a great influence on them. And unlike the twenty different analytics and ad scripts you now find on many websites it not only wastes hardly any space but also doesn't meaningfully inconveniece users (not any more than forgetting to turn of the server and x-powered-by headers at least).

This sentiment is what is removing - day by day - the soul of the world wide web.

Not everything is about efficiancy gains - it's ok to just have fun. The internet never has been serious business, nor will I (or many others) ever treat it as such.

All those ... 50 bytes or whatever it is, yes.

If you want to pick a fight about bandwidth waste, start with spam, not this.

He would have had the beginnings of dementia at the time of writing the book, please cut him some slack.

What a mean and unnecessary thing to say :-(