11 ms·

Built to Last – RSS, HTTP (2015)

118 points by mrzool 5y ago

superkuh 5y ago
Too bad that browsers are depreciating both RSS (ie, firefox removed feed rendering support) and HTTP (ie, firefox pushing HTTPS only). And HTTP3 isn't even tcp anymore it uses the google-mostly QUIC on udp. For the corporate web RSS and HTTP are dead. But as a non-corporate human person I'll be sure to keep RSS and HTTP alive on my webservers.
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  HTTP 1 will outlive the death of HTTP 3, QUIC, and Google. New standards come and go, old standards exist forever. RSS will probably make a comeback eventually: The ability to automatically process information is a common wheel we reinvent.
  - forgotmypw17 5y ago
    It's true, and especially HTTP/1.1 has a whole 25 years worth of browsers which are still usable today! I think as the nostalgia/retro factor kicks in, it will become cool again to support "Any Browser". A few common questions about this are: Security exploits: Yes, you do have to do this on a safe network, but at least over where I am, the Internet is safe enough for me to visit un-malicious websites, perhaps using a VM. The difficulty of it: It's moderately difficult, but quite doable, with certain constraints combined with progressive enhancement. (HTTP/1.0 browsers are slightly more difficult to support, because you need a dedicated IP address, as there is no Host: header yet. Netscape 1.x, IE 1.x and 2.x, Mosaic are quite usable if you can get this set up.)
- nightpool 5y ago
  Chrome on Android just trialed a new RSS-based "follow" feature a few months ago: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/20/22445284/google-rss-chrome-android-feature-test https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/20/22445284/google-rss-chrom...
  - themodelplumber 5y ago
    Wow! Didn't expect that. I guess I had better check what's even available in my feeds, and where it's coming from...
- lucideer 5y ago
  On RSS I'd agree, but I think you've missed the mark on HTTPS. HTTP-over-TLS works fine across all "versions" of HTTP, HTTPS has been supported by browsers since 1994; over half a decade before RSS was even a thing. Your criticisms of HTTPS seem more targeted at HTTP3, but that's actually a separate topic (HTTP3 may be HTTPS-only in practice but that's not the specific aspect you're critiquing). RSS/Atom also work fine over HTTPS.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    HTTP over TLS does not work fine for all versions of HTTP. A fully updated install of Windows XP is essentially incapable of establishing a modern TLS connection because everyone removed support for older crypto. It follows that modern TLS is a crypto treadmill that ejects older devices as soon as they cannot keep up with security updates.
    - georgyo 5y ago
      Windows XP... I cannot tell if you are trolling or not. It hasn't received patches in 10 years, so having it connected to the internet at all is a bigger problem than it's lack of tls1.3 support.
      - selfhoster11 5y ago
        I'm absolutely not trolling. I regularly have to use an old XP machine for various tasks, and as long as it's firewalled properly (preferably only allows traffic to a pre-set list of servers) and the security surface is reduced by removing unused services, it shouldn't be too risky to use for special-purpose tasks. General-purpose browsing is a whole different matter. I wouldn't advise anyone to do that unless on a patched, up to date and supported machine.
        roywashere 5y ago
        If you go on using a pre-set list of servers, you also would be able to do reverse HTTP proxies. Using a pre-set list of servers with many sites is not easy, because they'd use CDNs and such. So basically you can only use it for your 'own' websites and then you can control crypto on server side.
- anderspitman 5y ago
  I think that QUIC and HTTP/3 are great, but I worry that HTTP/1.1 will eventually be abandoned. I think it's important to be able to implement basic HTTP functionality with a few lines of code.
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > I worry that HTTP/1.1 will eventually be abandoned. HTTP/2? Sure HTTP/1.1? Not a chance. It's too widespread and too valuable, and the floor is too low. Unless Google starts a singular effort against it and manages to pull in the other big cos while avoiding the ire of the liberal states, which seems unlikely.
    - vbezhenar 5y ago
      HTTP 1 is magical. It's so simple to generate or parse. It'll never be abandoned just because of that reason.
      - divbzero 5y ago
        Yes, headers in text plus body in any content type is incredibly simple and flexible. It’s hard to imagine redesigning HTTP/1 to be any more straightforward.
    - anderspitman 5y ago
      I sincerely hope you're right. I certainly intend to always support it on my services. But it's all too easy for me to imagine a world where Chrome/Blink drops support.
      - hopesthoughts 5y ago
        Chrome doesn't actually support RSS anyway. There are extensions for it, but it doesn't actually support it.
- tootie 5y ago
  RSS is still the predominant format for syndicating podcasts. I think it's to come under attack by big players looking to build a walled garden (Spotify and Apple in particular) but it's hanging on.
- jedimastert 5y ago
  RSS is just an XML format, and I don't think in-browser support was what was holding it together. There's still plenty of readers, and there's nothing stopping other readers from popping up. It'd be like saying Firefox is deprecating JSON because it doesn't have a nice viewer for it...
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    Firefox has an excellent JSON viewer.
  - superkuh 5y ago
    They also removed the little RSS icon that shows up in the URL bar on autodiscovery of RSS feeds by HTML head entries. That hurts RSS far more than removing the render did. It's part of a series of intentional moves to depreciate RSS and Atom.
    - jedimastert 5y ago
      What purpose would they have to intentionally deprecate RSS/Atom?
      - superkuh 5y ago
        It's not used by Netflix/Youtube/etc so it's not important to Mozilla's current leaders.
        hopesthoughts 5y ago
        It's definitely used by Youtube. Youtube has RSS feeds for all channels.
- exdsq 5y ago
  Is HTTP3 quic on non-Chromium browsers?
  - TheCycoONE 5y ago
    QUIC was brought to the ietf for standardization and they decided to separate the transport protocol from the application protocol and potentially support other application protocols over quic in the future, resulting in http3 becoming a separate spec. https://quicwg.org/base-drafts/draft-ietf-quic-http.html https://quicwg.org/base-drafts/draft-ietf-quic-http.html
- maccolgan 5y ago
  even worse, QUIC embeds layering violation into the protocol, it can be ok as a web browser-web server protocol to minmax the TTB, but cannot be a protocol to build new applications
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  A majority of the feeds I subscribe to are https these days.
pletnes 5y ago
Are there even any great RSS readers anymore? I sure would like a nice win+linux FOSS reader with a snappy keyboard based UI. Or something.
- mrzool 5y ago
  I use Miniflux and I'm very happy: https://miniflux.app https://miniflux.app There's a paid hosting version that's only $15/year.
  - hopesthoughts 5y ago
    Yeah me too! I have my own instance. Well I have a service that set it up for me.
- CarelessExpert 5y ago
  These days the best-of-breed are all web-based, which is fine by me since it's web-based content I'm reading, anyway. I personally run tt-rss and I quite like it precisely because it's light, fast, has good keyboard shortcuts, and has a solid Android app. I used to use Feedly and it's also an excellent option if you're not into hosting your own infrastructure.
  - asdff 5y ago
    I've used almost all of the readers, web and software based, and ended up settling on newsboat. You can set up a url handler script that throws links at appropriate viewers (like mpv for youtube videos, rtv for reddit threads) and it ends up being pretty seamless and fast. No mobile of course which I don't mind, but you could just export your feed list and use another rss reader for that if you really needed your feeds on your phone too.
- APock 5y ago
  I use InoReader, its essentially google reader in all the ways that (used to) matter
- poetaster 5y ago
pvtmert 5y ago
imo DNS is much more capable world wide database. also BGP...
remram 5y ago
> I’d argue that the web, more specifically http, offered up the last truly new paradigm in computing. It is a single, elegant standard for distributed systems. We should all take the time every now and then to think about the beauty, power, and simplicity of this standard. What is really funny about that sentence is that the word "http" links to the wikipedia article through href.li, in order to hide the referer, a built-in feature of HTTP 1.1 and the web. So much for elegance and simplicity when I am staring at a workaround using an external system for something as simple as a link.
- quonn 5y ago
  So? There is an attribute to control that. Sure, the default has less privacy but that has little to do with the transport and is a property of the document spec.
  - notriddle 5y ago
    A feature of the HTML spec that's so new even IE11 doesn't implement it? That hardly seems like a glowing recommendation for HTTP/1.
jcelerier 5y ago
> It is a single, elegant standard for distributed systems. is this some elaborate parody
gego 5y ago
tiny-tiny RSS ftw
russellbeattie 5y ago
Problems with RSS: 1. Inconsistent implementation of standards: The implemented versions of RSS and Atom out there makes parsing more of an art than just throwing a library at it as no RSS parsing library out there can handle all the edge cases. (The last time I did a test a few years ago in an hour long sample from one of the RSS firehoses out there pulled up hundreds of custom namespaces and tag names.) 2. XML formatting: Consistently formatted, well formed XML is never 100%, even from by major news organizations. Embedded CDATA means parsing content is a quagmire of double escaping. 3. Inconsistent content: A RSS feed could just have the last few items that have been updated, with just titles or links, or it could be literally all of the content of a blog, jammed into some 20MB+ text file, double escaped and simply enlarged after every new update. 4. Inconsistent unique identifiers and HTTP header responses: Many sites will respond appropriately to requests with a 304 if there are no changes. Many will not. Many sites will give each RSS item a globally unique identifier, many will not. This forces every Reader to simply request the whole doc over and over again, comparing unique items with a blend of logic and magic. 5. Inconsistent support: Most sites that use RSS have no business model attached to it, so it's just sort of an afterthought and may be shut down at any time, and often is. All this leads to: Massive amounts of wasted bandwidth as bots poll endlessly for updates, wasted processing time parsing unformatted or badly formatted content, wasted storage because of bad IDs and URLS, wasted effort on the user's part dealing with the inevitable errors, and wasted effort on the admin side dealing with an antiquated tech that should have gone away with MySpace. RSS should be scrapped. Killed. Replaced. Forgotten.
- netghost 5y ago
  You're entirely right, and yet I think there's still a place for it. It all depends on what you want to use it for. For my use case, I built a feed reader that just needs to know the titles, URLS, and publication dates of articles. That let me build an RSS/Atom reader that lets me curate my own news feeds and delegates everything else to the normal browser. Are there inconsistencies and broken feeds? Sure a few, but for my purposes, I can ignore 99% of that. Is it wasteful? Sure, it. could be more efficient, but honestly downloading React and a hundred dependencies every time I visit a webpage is as well. Fear not though, many sites built with tools like Gatsby aren't including RSS feeds, so your wishes may still come true.
david_draco 5y ago
Dude, you're not supposed to admit you like XML!
notriddle 5y ago
Anything built on domain names cannot be described as "built to last." Not HTTP, not SMTP, not Gopher, not DNS, not the Fediverse. This is because domain names are rented out, and have expiration times attached to them, so obviously they can only last as long as the organization behind both the domain and the registrar keeps it there. IRC and USENET were built to last. Names in either network weren't tied to anyone but the collective "network." Neither network gets used much today, since names aren't tied to anyone in particular. It turns out that globally writable data stores are great vehicles for spam and fraud. Content-addressed systems like BitTorrent and I2P can theoretically maintain content availability for as long as anybody wants to keep it available, not just whoever originally published it. BitTorrent is also pretty secure, but it's not truly fair since it's an immutable data store, and all the spam and fraud is just outsourced to HTTP instead of being eliminated entirely.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  > theoretically maintain content availability for as long as anybody wants to keep it available, not just whoever originally published it I'd argue that this is probably as good as we can get. Even if something is built-to-last, a person can still throw something away (and indeed many people find good stuff in dumpsters!) If nobody is willing to pay the cost to actually host something, then it goes "into the trash" so to speak. I realize that physical goods last even in the trash, but that's not something a digital good can ever be unless it's serialized to some form of storage. VPRI (of Alan Kay fame) has published an interesting paper [1] trying to create a Cuneiform Tablet of code. [1]: The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 - http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf
- gnubison 5y ago
  Wait, isn’t IRC also built on domain names? (Albeit at a lower level)
  - lmm 5y ago
    Individual servers have domain names but only as a convenience. The network can outlive any particular domain.
mastrsushi 5y ago
I wish he went on more about email. It’s extendable, supports HTML, and has been around forever.
hopesthoughts 5y ago
Sure RSS was built to last, but I don't think The Old reader is or was.

118 points by mrzool 5y ago

Too bad that browsers are depreciating both RSS (ie, firefox removed feed rendering support) and HTTP (ie, firefox pushing HTTPS only). And HTTP3 isn't even tcp anymore it uses the google-mostly QUIC on udp. For the corporate web RSS and HTTP are dead. But as a non-corporate human person I'll be sure to keep RSS and HTTP alive on my webservers.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago
HTTP 1 will outlive the death of HTTP 3, QUIC, and Google. New standards come and go, old standards exist forever. RSS will probably make a comeback eventually: The ability to automatically process information is a common wheel we reinvent.
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  It's true, and especially HTTP/1.1 has a whole 25 years worth of browsers which are still usable today! I think as the nostalgia/retro factor kicks in, it will become cool again to support "Any Browser". A few common questions about this are: Security exploits: Yes, you do have to do this on a safe network, but at least over where I am, the Internet is safe enough for me to visit un-malicious websites, perhaps using a VM. The difficulty of it: It's moderately difficult, but quite doable, with certain constraints combined with progressive enhancement. (HTTP/1.0 browsers are slightly more difficult to support, because you need a dedicated IP address, as there is no Host: header yet. Netscape 1.x, IE 1.x and 2.x, Mosaic are quite usable if you can get this set up.)
nightpool 5y ago
Chrome on Android just trialed a new RSS-based "follow" feature a few months ago: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/20/22445284/google-rss-chrome-android-feature-test https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/20/22445284/google-rss-chrom...
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  Wow! Didn't expect that. I guess I had better check what's even available in my feeds, and where it's coming from...
lucideer 5y ago
On RSS I'd agree, but I think you've missed the mark on HTTPS. HTTP-over-TLS works fine across all "versions" of HTTP, HTTPS has been supported by browsers since 1994; over half a decade before RSS was even a thing. Your criticisms of HTTPS seem more targeted at HTTP3, but that's actually a separate topic (HTTP3 may be HTTPS-only in practice but that's not the specific aspect you're critiquing). RSS/Atom also work fine over HTTPS.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  HTTP over TLS does not work fine for all versions of HTTP. A fully updated install of Windows XP is essentially incapable of establishing a modern TLS connection because everyone removed support for older crypto. It follows that modern TLS is a crypto treadmill that ejects older devices as soon as they cannot keep up with security updates.
  - georgyo 5y ago
    Windows XP... I cannot tell if you are trolling or not. It hasn't received patches in 10 years, so having it connected to the internet at all is a bigger problem than it's lack of tls1.3 support.
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      I'm absolutely not trolling. I regularly have to use an old XP machine for various tasks, and as long as it's firewalled properly (preferably only allows traffic to a pre-set list of servers) and the security surface is reduced by removing unused services, it shouldn't be too risky to use for special-purpose tasks. General-purpose browsing is a whole different matter. I wouldn't advise anyone to do that unless on a patched, up to date and supported machine.
      - roywashere 5y ago
        If you go on using a pre-set list of servers, you also would be able to do reverse HTTP proxies. Using a pre-set list of servers with many sites is not easy, because they'd use CDNs and such. So basically you can only use it for your 'own' websites and then you can control crypto on server side.
anderspitman 5y ago
I think that QUIC and HTTP/3 are great, but I worry that HTTP/1.1 will eventually be abandoned. I think it's important to be able to implement basic HTTP functionality with a few lines of code.
- masklinn 5y ago
  > I worry that HTTP/1.1 will eventually be abandoned. HTTP/2? Sure HTTP/1.1? Not a chance. It's too widespread and too valuable, and the floor is too low. Unless Google starts a singular effort against it and manages to pull in the other big cos while avoiding the ire of the liberal states, which seems unlikely.
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    HTTP 1 is magical. It's so simple to generate or parse. It'll never be abandoned just because of that reason.
    - divbzero 5y ago
      Yes, headers in text plus body in any content type is incredibly simple and flexible. It’s hard to imagine redesigning HTTP/1 to be any more straightforward.
  - anderspitman 5y ago
    I sincerely hope you're right. I certainly intend to always support it on my services. But it's all too easy for me to imagine a world where Chrome/Blink drops support.
    - hopesthoughts 5y ago
      Chrome doesn't actually support RSS anyway. There are extensions for it, but it doesn't actually support it.
tootie 5y ago
RSS is still the predominant format for syndicating podcasts. I think it's to come under attack by big players looking to build a walled garden (Spotify and Apple in particular) but it's hanging on.
jedimastert 5y ago
RSS is just an XML format, and I don't think in-browser support was what was holding it together. There's still plenty of readers, and there's nothing stopping other readers from popping up. It'd be like saying Firefox is deprecating JSON because it doesn't have a nice viewer for it...
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  Firefox has an excellent JSON viewer.
- superkuh 5y ago
  They also removed the little RSS icon that shows up in the URL bar on autodiscovery of RSS feeds by HTML head entries. That hurts RSS far more than removing the render did. It's part of a series of intentional moves to depreciate RSS and Atom.
  - jedimastert 5y ago
    What purpose would they have to intentionally deprecate RSS/Atom?
    - superkuh 5y ago
      It's not used by Netflix/Youtube/etc so it's not important to Mozilla's current leaders.
      - hopesthoughts 5y ago
        It's definitely used by Youtube. Youtube has RSS feeds for all channels.
exdsq 5y ago
Is HTTP3 quic on non-Chromium browsers?
- TheCycoONE 5y ago
  QUIC was brought to the ietf for standardization and they decided to separate the transport protocol from the application protocol and potentially support other application protocols over quic in the future, resulting in http3 becoming a separate spec. https://quicwg.org/base-drafts/draft-ietf-quic-http.html https://quicwg.org/base-drafts/draft-ietf-quic-http.html
maccolgan 5y ago
even worse, QUIC embeds layering violation into the protocol, it can be ok as a web browser-web server protocol to minmax the TTB, but cannot be a protocol to build new applications
hopesthoughts 5y ago
A majority of the feeds I subscribe to are https these days.

pletnes 5y ago

Are there even any great RSS readers anymore? I sure would like a nice win+linux FOSS reader with a snappy keyboard based UI. Or something.

mrzool 5y ago
I use Miniflux and I'm very happy: https://miniflux.app https://miniflux.app There's a paid hosting version that's only $15/year.
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  Yeah me too! I have my own instance. Well I have a service that set it up for me.
CarelessExpert 5y ago
These days the best-of-breed are all web-based, which is fine by me since it's web-based content I'm reading, anyway. I personally run tt-rss and I quite like it precisely because it's light, fast, has good keyboard shortcuts, and has a solid Android app. I used to use Feedly and it's also an excellent option if you're not into hosting your own infrastructure.
- asdff 5y ago
  I've used almost all of the readers, web and software based, and ended up settling on newsboat. You can set up a url handler script that throws links at appropriate viewers (like mpv for youtube videos, rtv for reddit threads) and it ends up being pretty seamless and fast. No mobile of course which I don't mind, but you could just export your feed list and use another rss reader for that if you really needed your feeds on your phone too.
APock 5y ago
I use InoReader, its essentially google reader in all the ways that (used to) matter
poetaster 5y ago

pvtmert 5y ago

imo DNS is much more capable world wide database. also BGP...

remram 5y ago

> I’d argue that the web, more specifically http, offered up the last truly new paradigm in computing. It is a single, elegant standard for distributed systems. We should all take the time every now and then to think about the beauty, power, and simplicity of this standard. What is really funny about that sentence is that the word "http" links to the wikipedia article through href.li, in order to hide the referer, a built-in feature of HTTP 1.1 and the web. So much for elegance and simplicity when I am staring at a workaround using an external system for something as simple as a link.

quonn 5y ago
So? There is an attribute to control that. Sure, the default has less privacy but that has little to do with the transport and is a property of the document spec.
- notriddle 5y ago
  A feature of the HTML spec that's so new even IE11 doesn't implement it? That hardly seems like a glowing recommendation for HTTP/1.

jcelerier 5y ago

> It is a single, elegant standard for distributed systems. is this some elaborate parody

gego 5y ago

tiny-tiny RSS ftw

russellbeattie 5y ago

Problems with RSS: 1. Inconsistent implementation of standards: The implemented versions of RSS and Atom out there makes parsing more of an art than just throwing a library at it as no RSS parsing library out there can handle all the edge cases. (The last time I did a test a few years ago in an hour long sample from one of the RSS firehoses out there pulled up hundreds of custom namespaces and tag names.) 2. XML formatting: Consistently formatted, well formed XML is never 100%, even from by major news organizations. Embedded CDATA means parsing content is a quagmire of double escaping. 3. Inconsistent content: A RSS feed could just have the last few items that have been updated, with just titles or links, or it could be literally all of the content of a blog, jammed into some 20MB+ text file, double escaped and simply enlarged after every new update. 4. Inconsistent unique identifiers and HTTP header responses: Many sites will respond appropriately to requests with a 304 if there are no changes. Many will not. Many sites will give each RSS item a globally unique identifier, many will not. This forces every Reader to simply request the whole doc over and over again, comparing unique items with a blend of logic and magic. 5. Inconsistent support: Most sites that use RSS have no business model attached to it, so it's just sort of an afterthought and may be shut down at any time, and often is. All this leads to: Massive amounts of wasted bandwidth as bots poll endlessly for updates, wasted processing time parsing unformatted or badly formatted content, wasted storage because of bad IDs and URLS, wasted effort on the user's part dealing with the inevitable errors, and wasted effort on the admin side dealing with an antiquated tech that should have gone away with MySpace. RSS should be scrapped. Killed. Replaced. Forgotten.

netghost 5y ago
You're entirely right, and yet I think there's still a place for it. It all depends on what you want to use it for. For my use case, I built a feed reader that just needs to know the titles, URLS, and publication dates of articles. That let me build an RSS/Atom reader that lets me curate my own news feeds and delegates everything else to the normal browser. Are there inconsistencies and broken feeds? Sure a few, but for my purposes, I can ignore 99% of that. Is it wasteful? Sure, it. could be more efficient, but honestly downloading React and a hundred dependencies every time I visit a webpage is as well. Fear not though, many sites built with tools like Gatsby aren't including RSS feeds, so your wishes may still come true.

david_draco 5y ago

Dude, you're not supposed to admit you like XML!

notriddle 5y ago

Anything built on domain names cannot be described as "built to last." Not HTTP, not SMTP, not Gopher, not DNS, not the Fediverse. This is because domain names are rented out, and have expiration times attached to them, so obviously they can only last as long as the organization behind both the domain and the registrar keeps it there. IRC and USENET were built to last. Names in either network weren't tied to anyone but the collective "network." Neither network gets used much today, since names aren't tied to anyone in particular. It turns out that globally writable data stores are great vehicles for spam and fraud. Content-addressed systems like BitTorrent and I2P can theoretically maintain content availability for as long as anybody wants to keep it available, not just whoever originally published it. BitTorrent is also pretty secure, but it's not truly fair since it's an immutable data store, and all the spam and fraud is just outsourced to HTTP instead of being eliminated entirely.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
> theoretically maintain content availability for as long as anybody wants to keep it available, not just whoever originally published it I'd argue that this is probably as good as we can get. Even if something is built-to-last, a person can still throw something away (and indeed many people find good stuff in dumpsters!) If nobody is willing to pay the cost to actually host something, then it goes "into the trash" so to speak. I realize that physical goods last even in the trash, but that's not something a digital good can ever be unless it's serialized to some form of storage. VPRI (of Alan Kay fame) has published an interesting paper [1] trying to create a Cuneiform Tablet of code. [1]: The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 - http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf
gnubison 5y ago
Wait, isn’t IRC also built on domain names? (Albeit at a lower level)
- lmm 5y ago
  Individual servers have domain names but only as a convenience. The network can outlive any particular domain.

mastrsushi 5y ago

I wish he went on more about email. It’s extendable, supports HTML, and has been around forever.

hopesthoughts 5y ago

Sure RSS was built to last, but I don't think The Old reader is or was.