Standards
Moving the Goalposts: “Use” Patents and Standards
It’s become quite fashionable for large IT shops to give blanket Royalty-Free licenses for implementation of “core” technologies, such as XML, Web Services and Atom. I’ll refrain from linking...
published on Wednesday, April 2 2008 ( 8 comments )
POST and PATCH
It’s 7am, I’m sitting in the Auckland Koru Club on my way home and reading the minor kerfuffle regarding PATCH with interest. For me, the critical difference between PATCH...
published on Sunday, February 17 2008 ( 2 comments )
Cache Channels Beta
The stale-while-revalidate and stale-if-error extensions aren’t the only fiddling we’ve been doing with the HTTP caching model. Now that Squid 2.7 is starting to see daylight, I can explain...
published on Friday, January 4 2008 ( 2 comments )
Two HTTP Caching Extensions
We use caching extensively inside Yahoo! to improve scalability, latency and availability for back-end HTTP services, as I’ve discussed before. However, there are a few situations where the plain...
published on Wednesday, December 12 2007 ( 11 comments )
Why Revise HTTP?
I haven’t talked about it here much, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the last year and a half working with people in the IETF to...
published on Sunday, December 9 2007 ( 9 comments )
5005
Feed Paging and Archiving (nee Feed History) has finally made it to a standards-track RFC. For many non-traditional (read: non-blog) applications of Atom, I think archived feeds in particular...
published on Saturday, September 8 2007 ( 3 comments )
Vendor-pires
Anne-Thomas Manes extolls the virtues of WS-*; The single, most important feature that inspires my enthusiasm about WS-* is that it has universal support from all the major vendors....
published on Wednesday, May 10 2006 ( 18 comments )
DOM vs. Web
Back at the W3C Technical Plenary, I argued that Working Groups need to concentrate on making more Web-friendly specifications. Here’s an example of one such lapse causing security problems...
published on Thursday, April 20 2006 ( 24 comments )
Are Namespaces (and mU) Necessary?
It’s become axiomatic in some circles — especially in WS-* land, as well as in many other uses of XML — that the preferred (or only) means of offering...
published on Friday, April 7 2006 ( 13 comments )
WS-Transfer, WAKA and the Web
Microsoft and friends (of the keep your enemy closer variety, I suspect) have submitted WS-Transfer to the W3C. I found the Team comment interesting; e.g., WS-Transfer can therefore be...
published on Wednesday, March 15 2006 ( 10 comments )
Separating the Data Model from its Serialisation
For some time, I’ve noticed that people defining XML formats spend an inordinate amount of time talking about the structure of the format. This is especially apparent in standards...
published on Wednesday, August 10 2005 ( 11 comments )
Transformational Standards
Don Box (whose blog doesn’t seem to be taking comments any more, so I’ll do it over here) points out some very cool technology he’s using, Microsoft’s Office Communicator....
published on Friday, July 22 2005
Don’t use the ‘feed’ URI Scheme
It’s been covered before elsewhere, but just a friendly reminder: ‘feed’ URIs are bad for the Web, as are any that are used solely for dispatch (e.g., ‘itms’, ‘pcast’)....
published on Friday, July 15 2005 ( 3 comments )
Perspectives on the Addressing Experiment
I don’t talk much about it here, but I’m honoured to be the Chair of the W3C Web Services Addressing Working Group. This is something of an experiment for...
published on Monday, June 27 2005 ( 2 comments )
The Map is Not the Territory
Werner makes an excellent point; [W]e need to continue to take care that we do not consider The Model to be The Truth. The web based internet is a...
published on Monday, February 7 2005 ( 3 comments )
JSON and XML
I’m intrigued by the JSON effort. While many people (and vendors) have chosen XML for data interchange because it’s not platform- or vendor-specific, these folks have chosen the other...
published on Monday, January 24 2005 ( 15 comments )
WS-Who's on First?
There are MEPs in SOAP and MEPs in WSDL. WS-Addressing doesn't have MEPs, but it does allow you to create patterns of messages.Meanwhile, SOAP has bindings and WSDL has bindings, and WS-Addressing have bindings too. But, a SOAP binding binds an underlying transport, a WSDL binding binds an abstract interface, and an Addressing binding binds abstract properties.That's not the properties in SOAP, by the way, which aren't exactly the same as the properties in WSDL.
published on Sunday, January 23 2005 ( 1 comment )
On How Google Fixed Comment Spam
More than a year after my modest suggestion, Google takes a step to fix comment spam. Hopefully, other people who re-publish Web content (like mailing list archives) will start...
published on Wednesday, January 19 2005 ( 1 comment )
HTTP Header Registries
An update to the Internet-Draft that provides initial values for the HTTP Header Message Registries is now available.
published on Wednesday, September 8 2004 ( 2 comments )
Innocent Fraud
...I have learned that to be right and useful, one must accept a continuing divergence between approved belief -- what I have elsewhere called conventional wisdom -- and the reality. And in the end, not surprisingly, it is the reality that counts.-- John Kenneth Galbraith, "The Economics of Innocent Fraud"I'm just starting this book, but it's pretty thought-provoking so far.
published on Thursday, September 2 2004
Registering Media Types
I've had a fairly large and annoying bee in my bonnet for the past few months, regarding media type registration. It started buzzing when I tried (and failed) to...
published on Saturday, August 23 2003 ( 1 comment )
Economics of standards
Looks like a good to-read list: John Beatty: Economics of Standards (via John Beatty, one of my fellow BEA-ers; hi John!)...
published on Sunday, June 22 2003 ( 1 comment )
While we're talking about standards...
I agree with just about everything that Jim Waldo says here (at least for protocol standards). Well said!...
published on Wednesday, May 28 2003
IETF Transparency
Finally, the IESG puts its money where its mouth is; this tool allows you to see the status and individual AD's comments about a particular I-D. It's only a start,...
published on Sunday, November 10 2002