4 ms·

RFC-2229 – A Dictionary Server Protocol

45 points by mindcrime 5y ago

mwcremer 5y ago
I had never heard of the "webster" protocol, and my DDG-fu has failed me. Can anyone point me to details?
- mindcrime 5y ago
  Yeah, info on that seems a bit scarce. I managed to find one or two pages that talk about "webster servers" and "webster clients". Don't see a protocol spec anywhere though. https://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~bruncott/elisp/webster19-alpha.el https://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~bruncott/elisp/webster19-alpha.... http://www.verycomputer.com/35_13631dc2bdda24ce_1.htm http://www.verycomputer.com/35_13631dc2bdda24ce_1.htm http://sepwww.stanford.edu/data/media/public/oldsep/scripts/misc/webster.pl http://sepwww.stanford.edu/data/media/public/oldsep/scripts/...
  - justsomehnguy 5y ago
    http://www.shawcomputing.net/resources/next/software/nextstep_screenshots/03-ns33-webster.html http://www.shawcomputing.net/resources/next/software/nextste... Also it's mentioned in NeXT-FAQ
don-code 5y ago
In general I have a lot of respect for pre-WWW, special-purpose protocol design. I don't see it as short-sighted, so much as the world wide web having been _that_ big a paradigm shift. That said, the date on this one is from 1997. Amazon was already selling books via the Web at that point, so I'm not totally sure what the use case is.
- userbinator 5y ago
  so I'm not totally sure what the use case is. That seems to be true for a lot of RFCs; a small number of them are so important and widely used that I've memorised their numbers (768, 791, 793, 821, 959, 1081, 2616, etc.) but then there's plenty of others which seem to have been merely "someone thought it was a good idea".
  - ramses0 5y ago
    Mayhaps they were “Requests For Comments” rather than “International Standards” or “Specifications” with some sort of recognized enforcement body behind them? It seems as though good “Walled Gardens” make “Good Neighbors”, so requests for comments may not be as important as they once were?
eska 5y ago
Curiously this standardized on utf8 already. Was it mainstream by 1997? I found a web UI here with many databases. But not all databases seem to be selected by default, e.g. one first has to pick the right one to get a result for a Japanese word. http://dict.org/bin/Dict http://dict.org/bin/Dict
- mindcrime 5y ago
  The web UI is handy, but what led me to this was messing around with the "dict" command line tool. I discovered that when I was randomly doing apt-cache search queries just to see if there was some sort of command line word lookup tool (it seems like a pretty obvious thing, in hindsight I'm not sure why I'd never looked before) and found "dict". That led me to wondering if there was a way to use wiktionary.org data with the CLI, which led to a reference to using the DICT remote protocol to connect to a DICT <-> Wiktionary Gateway (which wasn't actually working when I tried it. Bummer) and finding out that "dictionary servers" are a "thing" in the general sense. Not sure how many servers are "out there" that support this, but dict.dict.org at least seems to work, which is pretty cool.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
41b696ef1113 5y ago
This seems the best chance to get an answer: What is my best option for a free, offline dictionary and thesaurus I can use from the terminal?
- Wicher 5y ago
  https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Dictd https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Dictd
lucb1e 5y ago
Interesting. We write technical reports for customers every 1-2 weeks, and since customers can have technologies ranging from the very ordinary to the quite unique, there are often a number of words not in the dictionary that everyone has to add to theirs (this does not include names/words invented by the customer themselves, of course those would not be in there). I've already put my dictionary in our git, but people would have to put their internal git credentials into customer VMs and then still manually pull to get my updates semi-live. A dictionary server would solve this, I had never even considered the concept might exist. Someone linked dict.org below which searches a bunch of dictionaries. Rootkit is one of the words my default vim dict doesn't know, this website knows it! It pulls from the jargon file and has a good definition. Nice. But then the next attempt, versioning: nope. Does anyone happen to know if there is a community-maintained dictionary somewhere? Surely I'm not the first person to run into this. It having a brand names section (e.g. GitHub not Github) and acronyms (e.g. DKIM) would be a big plus, as those together make up about 2/3rds of the entries of my current custom dict. (I'd share it here but it's made during work time so I don't hold the copyright thereto, although I assume if I ask $boss on Monday it would be fine to contribute this back to any open source dictionaries out there.) Edit: I was looking at the sources of dict.org. This one is worth browsing through: The Devil's Dictionary https://web.archive.org/web/20170121170915/http://wiretap.area.com/Gopher/Library/Classic/devils.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20170121170915/http://wiretap.ar... (protip for looking up a specific word: search the page for the word plus a comma). Two favorites so far: "HATCHET, n. A young axe" and "EGOTIST, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me."
- sam_lowry_ 5y ago
  >Does anyone happen to know if there is a community-maintained dictionary somewhere? I remember seeing wikipedia being served over the dict protocol.
  - lucb1e 5y ago
    That would be quite useful as well, though again not without manual additions because not every word has a page (e.g. capacitances) and not every word on each page is spelled correctly (admittedly most are, but just two days ago I fixed a brand name capitalization typo). Perhaps with the addition of Wiktionary it would come a long way, though.

45 points by mindcrime 5y ago

mwcremer 5y ago

I had never heard of the "webster" protocol, and my DDG-fu has failed me. Can anyone point me to details?

mindcrime 5y ago
Yeah, info on that seems a bit scarce. I managed to find one or two pages that talk about "webster servers" and "webster clients". Don't see a protocol spec anywhere though. https://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~bruncott/elisp/webster19-alpha.el https://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~bruncott/elisp/webster19-alpha.... http://www.verycomputer.com/35_13631dc2bdda24ce_1.htm http://www.verycomputer.com/35_13631dc2bdda24ce_1.htm http://sepwww.stanford.edu/data/media/public/oldsep/scripts/misc/webster.pl http://sepwww.stanford.edu/data/media/public/oldsep/scripts/...
- justsomehnguy 5y ago
  http://www.shawcomputing.net/resources/next/software/nextstep_screenshots/03-ns33-webster.html http://www.shawcomputing.net/resources/next/software/nextste... Also it's mentioned in NeXT-FAQ

don-code 5y ago

In general I have a lot of respect for pre-WWW, special-purpose protocol design. I don't see it as short-sighted, so much as the world wide web having been _that_ big a paradigm shift. That said, the date on this one is from 1997. Amazon was already selling books via the Web at that point, so I'm not totally sure what the use case is.

userbinator 5y ago
so I'm not totally sure what the use case is. That seems to be true for a lot of RFCs; a small number of them are so important and widely used that I've memorised their numbers (768, 791, 793, 821, 959, 1081, 2616, etc.) but then there's plenty of others which seem to have been merely "someone thought it was a good idea".
- ramses0 5y ago
  Mayhaps they were “Requests For Comments” rather than “International Standards” or “Specifications” with some sort of recognized enforcement body behind them? It seems as though good “Walled Gardens” make “Good Neighbors”, so requests for comments may not be as important as they once were?

eska 5y ago

Curiously this standardized on utf8 already. Was it mainstream by 1997? I found a web UI here with many databases. But not all databases seem to be selected by default, e.g. one first has to pick the right one to get a result for a Japanese word. http://dict.org/bin/Dict http://dict.org/bin/Dict

mindcrime 5y ago
The web UI is handy, but what led me to this was messing around with the "dict" command line tool. I discovered that when I was randomly doing apt-cache search queries just to see if there was some sort of command line word lookup tool (it seems like a pretty obvious thing, in hindsight I'm not sure why I'd never looked before) and found "dict". That led me to wondering if there was a way to use wiktionary.org data with the CLI, which led to a reference to using the DICT remote protocol to connect to a DICT <-> Wiktionary Gateway (which wasn't actually working when I tried it. Bummer) and finding out that "dictionary servers" are a "thing" in the general sense. Not sure how many servers are "out there" that support this, but dict.dict.org at least seems to work, which is pretty cool.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

41b696ef1113 5y ago

This seems the best chance to get an answer: What is my best option for a free, offline dictionary and thesaurus I can use from the terminal?

Wicher 5y ago
https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Dictd https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Dictd

lucb1e 5y ago

Interesting. We write technical reports for customers every 1-2 weeks, and since customers can have technologies ranging from the very ordinary to the quite unique, there are often a number of words not in the dictionary that everyone has to add to theirs (this does not include names/words invented by the customer themselves, of course those would not be in there). I've already put my dictionary in our git, but people would have to put their internal git credentials into customer VMs and then still manually pull to get my updates semi-live. A dictionary server would solve this, I had never even considered the concept might exist. Someone linked dict.org below which searches a bunch of dictionaries. Rootkit is one of the words my default vim dict doesn't know, this website knows it! It pulls from the jargon file and has a good definition. Nice. But then the next attempt, versioning: nope. Does anyone happen to know if there is a community-maintained dictionary somewhere? Surely I'm not the first person to run into this. It having a brand names section (e.g. GitHub not Github) and acronyms (e.g. DKIM) would be a big plus, as those together make up about 2/3rds of the entries of my current custom dict. (I'd share it here but it's made during work time so I don't hold the copyright thereto, although I assume if I ask $boss on Monday it would be fine to contribute this back to any open source dictionaries out there.) Edit: I was looking at the sources of dict.org. This one is worth browsing through: The Devil's Dictionary https://web.archive.org/web/20170121170915/http://wiretap.area.com/Gopher/Library/Classic/devils.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20170121170915/http://wiretap.ar... (protip for looking up a specific word: search the page for the word plus a comma). Two favorites so far: "HATCHET, n. A young axe" and "EGOTIST, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me."

sam_lowry_ 5y ago
>Does anyone happen to know if there is a community-maintained dictionary somewhere? I remember seeing wikipedia being served over the dict protocol.
- lucb1e 5y ago
  That would be quite useful as well, though again not without manual additions because not every word has a page (e.g. capacitances) and not every word on each page is spelled correctly (admittedly most are, but just two days ago I fixed a brand name capitalization typo). Perhaps with the addition of Wiktionary it would come a long way, though.