MCP's Disregard for 40 Years of RPC Best Practices

Re:MCP's Disregard for 40 Years of RPC Best Practices by deathanatos on Saturday August 09, 2025 @04:19PM (#44849794)

> May have changed, but unlikely. I worked with medical telemetry as a young man and it was impressed upon me thoroughly how important parsing timestamps correctly was.

I also work in healthcare, and we've seen HL7v2 messages with impossible timestamps. (E.g., in the spring-forward gap.)

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Re:MCP's Disregard for 40 Years of RPC Best Practices by hinkley on Saturday August 09, 2025 @04:46PM (#44850045)

Since we were getting low latency data inside HTTP responses we could work off of the response header clock skew to narrow origination time down to around one second, and that’s almost as good as NTP can manage anyway.

As RPC mechanisms go, HTTP is notable for how few of the classic blunders they made in 1.0 of the spec. Clock skew correction is just my favorite. Technically it exists for cache directives, but it’s invaluable for coordination across machines. There are reasons HTTP 2.0 waited decades to happen. It just mostly worked.

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