Standards have no sense of humor
Jan 17, 2013FHIR is a draft standard that is early in it’s ballot cycle. It’s a reasonable anticipation that it will end up as a ISO standard in the fullness of time. But for now, it’s just a draft standard. Writing a standard is a huge piece of work, and you have find entertainment where you can…. with that in mind, I added a couple of jokes to the specification. In the roadmap, after describing Fthe general nature of FHIR, I add this line:
Compared to the all the other approaches, FHIR… [– Obligatory: insert your FHIR FIRE related joke here –].
It’s not as if I won’t have heard the joke before - sometimes my life seems to consist of a continuous stream of FHIR related puns and jokes. There’s several different pronounciations, each with their own stream of jokes.
The other point is in the RESTful specification, where I added a new HTTP status code. The existing status codes describe the server rejecting an HTTP request for a variety of transport/negotiation/parsing/security failures, but there is no code to say that the request as submitted would violate server business rules - all there is is a general server error. But the case that a client makes a request that would violate business rules on the server is both common and important in FHIR, so it was proposed that we should add an HTTP status code to indicate this status. Since adding a new HTTP status code is a rather involved process, I added a custom code on a temporary basis:
- 490 Talk to the Hand- the proposed resource violated server business rules.
Well, it turns out that HL7 balloters don’t have a sense of humor - both of these two attracted several negative ballot comments.
Guess I’ll have to find my entertainment somewhere else….