Web
The WS-Empire Strikes Back... feebly
Here’s a gem on a little-used mailing list: As most of you know, over the last several years fairly good progress has been made on standardizing Web services. Many...
published on Friday, July 4 2008 ( 9 comments )
Moving Beyond Methods in REST
Having complained before about the sad state of HTTP APIs, I’m somewhat happy to say that people seem to be getting it, producing more capable server-side and client-side tools...
published on Thursday, March 20 2008 ( 10 comments )
DAV WTF?
Not many people that I know outside of IETF circles realise that a new *DAV effort has started up; CardDAV. An address book access protocol leveraging the vCard data...
published on Monday, March 3 2008 ( 4 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 )
Another Kind of HTTP Negotiation
Here’s one that I’ve been wondering about for a while, for the LazyWeb (HTTP Geek Edition); PUTs and POSTs can result in the creation of new resources, or changes...
published on Wednesday, February 6 2008 ( 25 comments )
Watching WADL (and other rambling thoughts)
I’m following the discussion of RESTful Web description in general, and WADL in particular, with both difficulty and interest (see Dare, Patrick and Joe’s thoughts for a nice contrast)....
published on Monday, January 21 2008 ( 1 comment )
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 ( 3 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 ( 16 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 )
WADL Documentation XSLT Updated
I've updated the WADL documentation stylesheet, primarily to; Fix a bug with finding and displaying XML Schema Make it compatible with xsltproc (and hopefully most other XSLT1.0 processors that...
published on Friday, November 2 2007
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 )
ETags, ETags, ETags
I’ve been hoping to avoid this, but ETags seem to be popping up more and more often recently. For whatever reason, people latch onto them as a litmus test...
published on Tuesday, August 7 2007 ( 7 comments )
URI Templates Redux
URI Templates -01 is now an Internet-Draft. After sitting on the spec for a while and trying to figure out an elegant solution to the encoding problem, we decided...
published on Saturday, July 28 2007 ( 5 comments )
The State of Proxy Caching
A while back I wrote up the state of browser caching, after writing a quick-and-dirty XHR-based test page, with the idea that if people know how their content is...
published on Wednesday, June 20 2007 ( 13 comments )
Safari 3: Protecting Client-Side State
It's a little thing, but I'm very pleased to see that Safari 3 will check with you before you discard a page where you've entered data on a form;...
published on Wednesday, June 13 2007 ( 4 comments )
httperf rev
Martin Arlitt makes an exciting announcement; It is my pleasure to announce two new versions of httperf: 0.8.1 and 0.9.0. version 0.8.1 fixes the known bugs in version 0.8,...
published on Tuesday, May 1 2007
Squid is My Service Bus
The QCon presentation (slides) was ostensibly about how we use HTTP for services within Yahoo’s Media Group. When I started thinking about the talk, however, I quickly concluded that...
published on Sunday, April 29 2007 ( 6 comments )
WWW2007 Developers’ Track
We’ve announced the program for this years’ Developers’ Track, and I’m very excited about the lineup. For example, Ryan Boyd from Google will be presenting about GData right before...
published on Thursday, April 5 2007
REST Issues, Real and Imagined
I think that most of the debate about REST focuses on the wrong things, leading developers down the garden path at the expense of their productivity and the success...
published on Tuesday, February 27 2007 ( 14 comments )
Pipes!
Yahoo! (finally!) released Pipes as a beta today; congrats to the very talented team that put this together. Niall gives the geeks-eye view, and to be clear, this is...
published on Wednesday, February 7 2007 ( 8 comments )
Developers, Developers, Developers
A reminder: proposals for the Developers’ Track at WWW2007 should be in by February 16th. We’re looking for Web-focused presentations, demos and tutorials for and by developers. I’m particularly...
published on Wednesday, February 7 2007
SOA Jumps Shark
Uche calls it; So the SOA wars are heating up. More and more smart people are pointing out that the emperor has no clothes; but stakes is still crazy...
published on Monday, December 4 2006 ( 2 comments )
Schema for JSON
One of the perceived deficiencies of JSON is that it doesn’t have a schema language. I say “perceived” because the problems that a schema language brings often outweigh the...
published on Thursday, November 30 2006 ( 12 comments )
Friday Fun: I Hate Cookies
There are plenty of reasons to hate HTTP Cookies, but there’s one thing that especially annoys me; their syntax. Specifically, the Netscape spec allowed an “expires” field that contains...
published on Friday, October 27 2006 ( 8 comments )
Thoughts on Declarative Ajax
Dave Johnson writes up a nice summary of the issues of adding new elements to HTML for declarative Ajax, something that I ran into when doing HInclude. Basically, IE...
published on Thursday, October 19 2006 ( 7 comments )
Wanted: HTTP Yahoo!s
My team at Yahoo! is looking for a mid-level developer (5-10 years experience) to help build our HTTP/REST toolkit, among other things. The job is mostly coding Perl and...
published on Tuesday, October 17 2006
Does the Enterprise (Vendor) Get the Web?
A couple of interesting things have happened recently; first, Jonathan Marsh has a new job; WSO2 is a year-old startup which provides support services around Apache’s Axis 2 Web...
published on Friday, October 13 2006 ( 3 comments )
URI Templating, the Spec
As mentioned a while back, there are a variety of places where it would be useful to be able to describe the structure of a URI, rather than just...
published on Wednesday, October 4 2006 ( 8 comments )
More JavaScript Updates
Hot on the heels of the last batch, Stefan pointed me to Jesse Skinner’s addDOMLoadEvent, which seems to avoid the problems I found earlier (you know you’re in for...
published on Sunday, October 1 2006
Javascript Updates
I’ve updated the url_template.js and json_form.js libraries to fix some bugs, to make the demo I gave at XTech run more smoothly. It should work well on Safari, Mozilla...
published on Thursday, September 28 2006 ( 3 comments )
Surfing the Barcoded Web
Apple’s shipping an iSight camera in just about everything these days, and one of the coolest apps to use it is Delicious Library. If you follow that to its...
published on Saturday, September 16 2006 ( 4 comments )
Caching Performance Notes
There have been some interesting developments in Web caching lately, from a performance perspective; event loops are becoming mainstream, and there are lots of new contenders on the scene....
published on Monday, August 21 2006 ( 14 comments )
Un tutoriel de la mise en cache
Many thanks to J.J. Solari for translating the Caching Tutorial to French!...
published on Friday, August 18 2006
Putting the Web back in Web 2.0
Timbl has this great term “Webizing” that he uses to talk about giving existing systems the benefits of the Web architecture. Despite the first part of “Web 2.0”, I...
published on Monday, August 14 2006 ( 2 comments )
Friday Fun: Percent Encoding
If you boil down the BNF in both RFC2396 and RFC3986, path segments can contain the following characters without percent-encoding them: ALPHA DIGIT ! $ & ' ( ) *...
published on Friday, June 30 2006 ( 12 comments )
Welcome, Hugo!
Hugo has finally blogged the big news. He’s left one of the coolest jobs in the world — working for the W3C — to come to another one of...
published on Saturday, June 24 2006
Bringing Back the Link - With a Twist
Recently, there’s been a resurgence for the Link element in HTML; everything from Microformats to Atom autodiscovery is using it. This isn’t surprising; as machines start processing Web documents...
published on Thursday, June 22 2006 ( 8 comments )
Microsoft's RESTful Robots
A friend (who shall remain anonymous) pointed me to Microsoft’s announcement today regarding their foray into robotics, of all things. My eyes glazed over until they rested upon the...
published on Tuesday, June 20 2006 ( 13 comments )
Friday Fun: Feed Authentication with Cookies
See if your aggregator can subscribe to this feed (username/password: test/test) and post the results in comments.While you’re there, it would be interesting to know what happens if you...
published on Friday, June 9 2006 ( 22 comments )
Web Services are Dead, Long Live Web Services
When I joined Yahoo, one of the biggest adjustments I had to make was to their use of “Web Services”. There, that phrase means any kind of machine-to-machine communication...
published on Thursday, May 25 2006 ( 10 comments )
Caching Web 2.0
I just finished my XTech presentation, “Web 2.0 on Speed”. here are the slides [pdf]; I’m going to try to s5 them soon. There isn’t much new in this...
published on Tuesday, May 16 2006 ( 7 comments )
The State of Browser Caching
Updated 2006-06-03 One of the big problems that Web developers have with HTTP caching is that they don’t know how the caches behave; while the specs say one thing, the...
published on Thursday, May 11 2006 ( 20 comments )
Yaron Uncloaks!
Yaron publicly says what he’s doing at Microsoft (scroll down); I hear that HTTP stuff is pretty cool. If anyone cares you can peruse a bunch of blog entries...
published on Thursday, May 11 2006 ( 5 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 )
XTech
It’s official; I’ve got a last-minute slot at XTech, talking about all things Web caching....
published on Sunday, April 23 2006 ( 2 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 )
Bug Syncronicity
I’ve had a lyric running through my head for the last day or so, thanks to a couple of bugs. I am thinking it’s a sign that the freckles /...
published on Thursday, April 13 2006 ( 3 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 )
What good is SOAP to HTTP?
I’m a little confused by Mark Baker’s stance regarding SOAP; he seems to encourage the Web services world to use SOAP on top of HTTP in a fashion compatible...
published on Thursday, April 6 2006 ( 3 comments )
Don’s False Choice
True to form, Don’s using his witty charm and good looks (such as they are ;) to shape discussion of a topic… in this case, REST, where he splits...
published on Monday, March 20 2006 ( 9 comments )
Web Authentication
There’s some excitement out there about “Cookie-less HTTP Authentication.” While it’s tempting to say that cookies are evil (the fru-it of the dev-il), using them for authentication isn’t actually...
published on Thursday, March 16 2006 ( 11 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 )
Feed History Redux
Over the weekend, I submitted a new draft of Feed History. The big (and hopefully, last) change this time is the use of the “previous” and “subscription” Atom link...
published on Wednesday, March 1 2006
Invalidating Caches with POST
Have you ever posted a comment to a blog, found it missing, so you re-posted it, only to find two entries? Annoying, huh? Aaron pinged me the other day...
published on Saturday, February 18 2006 ( 12 comments )
Offline
Interesting; there are not one but two sessions at the upcoming ETech about taking Web applications offline. Given the current bent of O’Reilly conferences — speed dating for VCs...
published on Tuesday, February 7 2006 ( 6 comments )
How Web-Ready is XMLHttpRequest?
I’ve been playing around with some ideas that use XMLHttpRequest recently, but I keep on bumping up against implementation inconsistencies on IE vs. Safari vs. Opera vs. Mozilla. Although...
published on Monday, January 23 2006 ( 29 comments )
Safari and Content Sniffing
It took two years, but Apple has finally taken steps to limit Safari’s content-sniffing ways; Safari now displays certain documents that have text/plain headers as plain text rather than...
published on Wednesday, January 11 2006 ( 1 comment )
Making headway on OPTIONS
On the heels of mod_cgi, PHP now does the right thing (at least in 5.1) when setting the Allow header. mod_dav is still broken, though. Backstory here....
published on Monday, January 9 2006 ( 1 comment )
RFC 4229: HTTP Header Field Registrations
The useful end of RFC 3864 (at least regarding HTTP) is finally* here. When you need to know where a particular header is defined there’s now one place to...
published on Saturday, December 24 2005
Leveraging the Web: Caching
The first in an occasional series about the real-world benefits of REST and the Web architecture, as applied to HTTP. I used to work for a fairly huge company...
published on Saturday, November 26 2005 ( 5 comments )
REST vs..?
More and more people are getting turned on to the advantages of using REST as a higher-level abstraction for networked applications, often comparing it favourably to SOAP and Web...
published on Monday, November 7 2005 ( 12 comments )
Frameworks
Stumbled across this, from Ian Bicking; My problem with a lot of MVC web frameworks is that they are really a way of codifying one developers internal thinking about a...
published on Sunday, October 30 2005 ( 4 comments )
Calendar <-> Feed?
Does anybody know of a program or service that will look at a calendar file (e.g., vCalendar, iCalendar, hCalendar) and publish the entries on it as an RSS feed, where...
published on Wednesday, October 26 2005 ( 6 comments )
Emulating W3C ,tools with mod_rewrite
I don't know if this has already been done (it's not exactly rocket science), but for the benefit of those who want to emulate the W3C's cool ,tools functions with...
published on Sunday, October 23 2005 ( 3 comments )
Why Just GET and POST?
Why is it that Web browsers — Amaya excluded — don’t support PUT and DELETE? After all, if there are enough VCs foolish enough to part with their money for...
published on Saturday, October 22 2005 ( 10 comments )
OPTIONS Getting Better
Roy Fielding has just closed a bug that’s been around since 1996, and which I’ve previously lamented here; The block has now been deleted from all active branches of httpd...
published on Wednesday, October 19 2005 ( 3 comments )
XSLT for the Rest of the Web
I’ve raved before about how useful the XSLT document() function is, once you get used to it. However, the stars have to be aligned just so to use it; the...
published on Tuesday, October 18 2005 ( 12 comments )
2.0
Does anybody else chortle quietly when they see “2.0-this” and “2.0-that”? It’s getting absurd; first we had “Web 2.0” (never mind that this term has been used for years...
published on Wednesday, October 5 2005 ( 3 comments )
Feed History -04
Feed History draft -04 is out, with the only major change being the replacement of fh:stateful with fh:incremental, with corresponding changes throughout the document, to make the concepts a...
published on Monday, September 5 2005 ( 1 comment )
RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters
I took a pass at a revision of the RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters on the train this morning, as I realised it was dreadfully out of...
published on Thursday, September 1 2005 ( 2 comments )
Putting History in Your Feed
I’ve had a few e-mails asking how I got this site’s RSS feed to include its history, so here are the instructions for doing it in Moveable Type (the...
published on Monday, August 15 2005 ( 1 comment )
Feed History -03
Draft -03 of Feed History: Enabling Stateful Syndication is now available. Significant changes include: Added fh:archive element, to indicate that an entry is an archive Allow subscription feed to...
published on Monday, August 15 2005
Adding Semantics to Excel with Microformats and GRDDL
When I worked in the financial industry, I quickly noticed that Excel spreadsheets contain the bulk of the data in the enterprise. It may make IT execs tear their...
published on Saturday, August 13 2005 ( 1 comment )
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 )
HTTP Performance (again)
Some folks at IONA have written a paper entitled Where HTTP Fails SOAP. I had a chance to look at this before I got it published, and their conclusions...
published on Monday, August 8 2005 ( 1 comment )
Making Syndication Enterprise-Grade
After more than five years, syndication is maturing rapidly. It’s being used for more than blogging — whether it be stock quotes, system logs, or order lists — and...
published on Saturday, July 16 2005 ( 6 comments )
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 )
Never Mind the Corporate Blogs; Here’s the Wiki
While a lot of companies are exploring blogs as a means of building communities, Intuit* (makers of Quicken, TurboTax, etc.) has skipped directly to the next logical step; using...
published on Saturday, July 9 2005 ( 1 comment )
One Description to Bind them All? Nah.
You can describe just about anything with sufficient precision in plain English, given enough words. In practice, this doesn’t happen; specialised fields — whether science, finance or art —...
published on Friday, July 8 2005
Web Description at the W3C
The W3C has just started a mailing list for discussion of Web description formats; This mailing list is dedicated to discussion of Web description languages based on URI/IRI and...
published on Tuesday, May 24 2005 ( 2 comments )
Prefetching (again)
There’s been quite a kerfuffle over Google’s Web Accelerator, because it prefetches Web content. It’s amusing to see these issues recycle over time; in the late nineties, prefetching was...
published on Sunday, May 22 2005 ( 1 comment )
WADLing towards Web Description
Marc Hadley has released WADL in the wild, and I’m intrigued; based on a first look, I’d say it’s the most promising Web (as opposed to Web Services) description...
published on Wednesday, May 18 2005 ( 5 comments )
Google's Cache-Control Extensions
I happened to look at the HTTP headers returned from Google News just now (what can I say, I’m a HTTP geek), and I noticed something unusual; Last login:...
published on Thursday, May 12 2005 ( 5 comments )
Greasemonkey and the Web
There’s a lot of cool apps emerging for GreaseMonkey (and GreaseMonkIE and PithHelmet, for IE and Safari respectively). It seems like these extensions have a love/hate relationship with the...
published on Monday, May 9 2005 ( 20 comments )
Questions Leading to a Web Description Format
A while back, I published a series of entries (1,2,3,4) about would-be Web Description Formats, with the intent of figuring out which (if any) is suitable, or whether a...
published on Friday, April 29 2005 ( 6 comments )
Personalised RSS and Cookie Sharing
Should cookies be shared between your RSS aggregator and your Web browser? If they were, sites would be able to automatically personalise the feeds you subscribe to; would people...
published on Sunday, April 24 2005 ( 6 comments )
A Call to OPTIONS
Web metadata discovery is not a new topic, and one on which the final word has not been spoken. However, one of the most basic means of discovering something...
published on Sunday, April 3 2005 ( 8 comments )
Nevermore
A while back, I wrote up a description of a pattern for avoiding messages like “click submit only once.” I didn’t do much after that, because I’ve been a...
published on Monday, March 21 2005 ( 6 comments )
document(Web)
I love the XSLT document function. With it, you can access the whole Web from a stylesheet; this gives a lot of flexibility, in the right situation. For example,...
published on Tuesday, February 22 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 )
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 )
Tufte would be Proud
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released an SVG-based "animated population pyramid" that very nicely visualises the change in that country's population over time.
published on Friday, December 17 2004 ( 2 comments )
text/python?
I’m thinking about whether it would be a good idea to have a media type for Python source files, call it “text/python.” The main benefit that I see to...
published on Wednesday, December 15 2004 ( 9 comments )
Why POST is Special
In a recent post, Don gave his take on the enlightening nature of WS-Transfer; Honestly, WS-Transfer has been in the oven for quite a while. It’s been interesting to...
published on Sunday, October 10 2004 ( 11 comments )
The ‘Web’ in Web Services
I was very interested to see the reaction that people had to WS-Transfer over the last few days. While the SOAP Resource Representation Header had opprobrium heaped upon it (""), Transfer passed by with nothing more than a few nodding heads and people saying "aha." In my view, WS-Transfer deserves a lot more of that criticism; if anything, the Resource Representation Header tries to supplant MIME, not HTTP.
published on Monday, September 27 2004 ( 2 comments )
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 )
HTTP Authentication and Forms
It's no secret that HTTP authentication isn't used as often as it should be.
published on Thursday, August 26 2004 ( 21 comments )
The Whole Web in a Python Dictionary
A few days ago I blogged a straw-man API for client-side HTTP based on dictionaries. This turns out to be well-aligned with a project I’ve had on the back burner...
published on Saturday, July 31 2004 ( 8 comments )
Dictionary as API?
From the Daily Python URL comes another noteworthy API for XML; XMLFragment. I haven’t tried it yet (it doesn’t appear to be separately available, hint, hint), but I like the...
published on Monday, July 26 2004 ( 7 comments )
Web-izing The Finder
Timbl has talked about Web-izing databases and languages; what about operating systems? Despite Microsoft’s legal troubles brought about trying to integrate the browser into Windows, it’s a good idea. Here’s...
published on Sunday, July 18 2004 ( 2 comments )
Internet Mapping For the Little Guy
When Tim O’Reilly gave his keynote at eWorld this year, one of his major points was that Internet-based mapping (e.g., Yahoo maps, Mapquest) had failed to take off, despite their...
published on Thursday, July 1 2004 ( 2 comments )
What?
Check out the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group; it looks like our last, best hope for extending the browser platform to grow the Web....
published on Wednesday, June 16 2004
Use Cases for Web Description Formats
One thing about Web description formats that hasn’t seen much discussion yet is how people intend to use them. The WSDL Working Group has a Usage Scenarios document and a...
published on Monday, June 14 2004
Extreme URL Scraping and Debugging
Because Web sites often don’t make information available to us in the way we’d like, we have to bring the mountain to Mohammed and scrape screens. I’ve played around with...
published on Saturday, June 5 2004 ( 5 comments )
Ubiquitious Fragment Identifiers
Tim Bray is trying out “purple number signs” on his Web site to make fragment identifiers ubiquitous and easy to find. This site has something along similar lines, through this...
published on Sunday, May 30 2004 ( 2 comments )
WebDAV Access Control Protocol
RFC 3744 has been published: This document specifies a set of methods, headers, message bodies, properties, and reports that define Access Control extensions to the WebDAV Distributed Authoring Protocol. This...
published on Friday, May 28 2004
Go PATCH Go
It looks like the HTTP PATCH method proposal might be based on Delta Encoding, which is IMO one of the cooler and lesser-known HTTP technologies. I've heard of a few...
published on Monday, May 3 2004
Using WebDAV as a Description Format for REST
In the past, I’ve talked about reusing WSDL as a format for describing Web resources, as well as coming up with a bespoke format. One path that I’ve overlooked so...
published on Tuesday, April 27 2004 ( 6 comments )
Asynchrony: There Is No Spoon
One of the things that people find compelling about Web services is its promise of asynchrony. “HTTP is only request/response, and therefore synchronous; it’s terrible for long-lived business processes, where...
published on Monday, April 19 2004 ( 1 comment )
Describing Generative Identifiers in WSDL
To use WSDL to describe RESTful interactions, you need some way of accommodating generative resource identifiers. In a nutshell, this means some part of the URI is dynamic. For example,...
published on Friday, April 16 2004
Growing the Web
Ian Hickson is thinking about client-side technologies (scroll down a bit). Some of his ideas resonated; Sortable tree views and list views with rich formatting. Do a search on eBay,...
published on Sunday, March 28 2004 ( 2 comments )
Outage in the Web: Server Configuration
In an otherwise excellent article, Jon Udell blames the lack of one-click subscribe in syndication formats on lack of vision; How users will interact with the formats and APIs is...
published on Wednesday, March 17 2004 ( 11 comments )
Caching Tutorial Update
I’ve published a revision of the Caching Tutorial for Web Authors and Webmasters, the first non-trivial edit in some time almost since I wrote it in 1998. That said, there...
published on Sunday, February 15 2004
What is NetKernel?
Just got some mail regarding the Cacheability Engine which led me to NetKernel; NetKernel is a Java-based virtual REST operating system for internet applications. NetKernel is a scalable microkernel which...
published on Tuesday, February 3 2004
Why Do Web Server APIs Suck So Much?
HTTP provides considerable benefits to Web applications that take advantage of it; everything from scalability (through caching), client-integrated authentication, automated redirection, multiple format support and lots more. I’ve been drafting...
published on Monday, December 8 2003 ( 11 comments )
A Description Format for REST
Adam asks if there’s a description format for REST. I don’t know of any that have wide acceptance (and I think the hard-core RESTafarians will answer “REST is self-describing, that’s...
published on Sunday, December 7 2003 ( 3 comments )
Click Submit Only Once
I shudder when I see these words. Everyone I’ve asked has, at least once, gotten two orders of something online (personally, I’ve had the SonyEricsson store ship *three* duplicate orders);...
published on Saturday, September 13 2003 ( 9 comments )
HTTP Performance
I've heard several people in the industry assert that HTTP fundamentally limits the performance of applications that use it; in other words, there's a considerable disadvantage to using it, and...
published on Thursday, August 21 2003 ( 1 comment )
Structured URIs
I just found a draft finding that the W3C TAG published about a month ago, regarding the use of metadata in URIs. This is very cool, and I especially like...
published on Monday, August 11 2003 ( 1 comment )
iDisk Offline
Marc Hadley points out that the version of iDisk in OSX Panther looks like it will enable offline functionality with caching; it also looks to do some synchronization. I'd really...
published on Monday, August 4 2003
Subversion
Ted Leung points out that caching PUT (and other WebDAV methods) would suit Subversion - probably the most interesting WebDAV application under open development - quite well. The only thing...
published on Tuesday, July 29 2003
httpRange-14
Mark Baker is the latest in a series to weigh in on the TAG issue regarding what a HTTP URI can identify. I haven't followed the debate closely, but it...
published on Tuesday, July 29 2003 ( 1 comment )
Caching PUT
If we WebDAV-enable Web applications, people will be able to interact with them like filesystems. To blog something, you'd be able to write an entry in the text editor of...
published on Saturday, July 26 2003 ( 2 comments )
Blogging with WebDAV
One of my personal background tasks in the last couple of months has been finding sample applications to excercise Tarawa with. Although my load is high and I've only got...
published on Saturday, July 26 2003
Profiling HTTP
Mark Pilgrim is starting to think about issues surrounding the transport, transfer and general moving around of the Format Formerly Known as Echo (nee Pie). This feels suspiciously like a...
published on Friday, July 25 2003 ( 3 comments )
Caching is often enough
I feel compelled to respond to Norm Walsh's thoughts on caching. It's important to distinguish between the capabilities of a specific product (such as WWWoffle) and the technology that it...
published on Saturday, June 28 2003
Spot the difference...
What does this interesting new, ad hoc work have to do with this interesting , new standards work and this interesting, new-ish effort by GK?...
published on Tuesday, June 17 2003 ( 1 comment )
Web-izing the Palm Pilot
Having a network-enabled (even if only through BlueTooth and infrared) is a heady experience; the ability to access the Web and sync applications from anywhere - really anywhere - is...
published on Thursday, June 12 2003 ( 1 comment )
XCAP
Jonathan Rosenberg published a new Internet-Draft, XCAP, to the SIMPLE Working Group in the IETF. Here's the skinny: Abstract This specification defines the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Configuration Access Protocol...
published on Thursday, May 29 2003
Conneg based on XML Dialect
I know at least one person who will think that this is a good idea. Anybody else? I'd looove to do this work......
published on Thursday, May 8 2003 ( 3 comments )
Tarawa
I've finally gotten sick enough of a project that I've been working on for waaaay too long to release it to the unsuspecting^H^H^H general public. Tarawa is, in short, a...
published on Monday, May 5 2003
It's alive
For those who have been helping, it's alive, has been for almost a week, but I still want to do a bit more documentation, hunt down a few bugs, and...
published on Saturday, April 26 2003 ( 1 comment )
ETags
It's not necessary to lament the lack of ETags on generated Web pages; cgi_buffer automagically generates and validates them for Perl, Python and PHP scripts. Yes, I keep on shamelessly...
published on Thursday, April 24 2003 ( 2 comments )
HTTP header sniffing
LiveHTTPHeaders for Mozilla is the best HTTP header sniffer I've seen yet; up till now, I've been using WebTee, but for *most* purposes, this is much better. Enjoy....
published on Tuesday, April 8 2003
Macrosoft, Part II
Dave seems excited by Macromedia's announcement. I'm less enthusiastic. Not only does it lock you into one vendor, but their product, well, sucks. Anitra loaded up Flash MX on the...
published on Thursday, March 27 2003
RSS standardization (again)
Jorgen hits a subject that's of great interest to me; RSS standardization. I originally started the Syndication list to get RSS moving towards some sort of recognized standard; more recently,...
published on Tuesday, March 25 2003
Blogging Zipf
I always wondered why so many people had their blogs' comments and even trackback indicators turned off. Go ahead and surf around; it's a rare blog indeed, at least in...
published on Sunday, January 26 2003 ( 3 comments )
Mozilla Prefetching
I'm extremely wary about the new prefetching feature in Mozilla. The Web caching community has tried this from about every angle, but the general consensus of professionals (with one...
published on Wednesday, November 27 2002 ( 4 comments )
Macrosoft?
Jeremy Allaire talks about establishing a "rich client" platform because HTML is "stagnant." Two questions; will it be standards-based, and what about SVG? I'd really rather not have Macromedia succeed...
published on Thursday, September 12 2002