So You Want To Define a Well-Known URI
Friday, 19 June 2026
When to reach for a well-known URI — and the traps that catch most protocol designers.all entries
Web Feeds in 2026: A Survey
Sunday, 10 May 2026
I looked through Common Crawl and found over 500,000 parseable RSS/Atom feeds, confirming that Web feeds are still a major part of the Open Web. But most aren’t high quality, and autodiscovery often points users at stale or abandoned feeds.What's Missing in the ‘Agentic’ Story
Friday, 24 April 2026
Every online interaction is a lopsided negotiation. For AI to truly work for us, we need more than just safety -- we need to start building true agency as a form of collective bargaining.Using AI to Evaluate Internet Standards (Part Two)
Wednesday, 25 March 2026
Standards work is notoriously hard to track. Let’s explore if grounding AI in working group records can make that history more accessible.The Internet Isn’t Facebook: How Openness Changes Everything
Friday, 20 February 2026
Openness makes the Internet harder to govern — but also makes it resilient, innovative, and difficult to capture. Let's look at how the openness of the Internet both defines it and ensures its success.The Power of 'No' in Internet Standards
Friday, 13 February 2026
The voluntary nature of Internet standards means that the biggest power move may be to avoid playing the game. Let's take a look.Some Thoughts on the Open Web
Tuesday, 20 January 2026
The Open Web means several things to different people, depending on context, but recently discussions have focused on the Web's Openness in terms of access to information -- how easy it is to publish and obtain information without barriers there.Principles for Global Online Meetings
Sunday, 26 October 2025
Some thoughts about how to schedule online meetings for a global organisation in an equitable way.Bridging the Gap Between Standards and Policy
Saturday, 20 September 2025
Achieving policymakers' goals in coordination with Internet standards activity can be difficult. This post explores some of the options and considerations involved.Using AI to Evaluate Internet Standards
Wednesday, 4 June 2025
Is AI a useful option for policymakers who want to evaluate open standards? Let's take a look.Apple’s Best Option: Decentralize iCloud
Sunday, 9 February 2025
What can Apple do in the face of a UK order to weaken encryption worldwide? Decentralize iCloud, to start.Platform Advantages: Not Just Network Effects
Friday, 29 November 2024
A new book explores an intriguing idea: that there are core processes in some platforms that naturally tilt the table towards being implemented in a single company.On Opting Out of Copyright
Wednesday, 18 September 2024
The EU AI Act and emerging practice flip copyright’s default opt-in regime to an opt-out one. What effects is this likely to have on the balance of power between rights holders and reuse?What RSS Needs
Sunday, 25 August 2024
Web feeds could be so much more if we put some effort into them. This post explores how we could start.Are Internet Standards Competitive or Collaborative?
Tuesday, 16 July 2024
It's often assumed that standards work is inherently competitive. This post examines why Internet standards are often more collaborative than competitive, and outlines some implications of this approach.Openness in Internet Standards: Necessary, but Insufficient
Friday, 5 July 2024
The phrase 'Open Standards' is widely used but not well-understood. Let's take a look at what openness in standards is, with a focus on whether and how it helps to legitimise the design and maintenance of the Internet.Consensus in Internet Standards
Friday, 24 May 2024
It’s common for voluntary technical standards developing organisations (SDOs such as the IETF and W3C) to make decisions by consensus, rather than (for example) voting. This post explores why we use consensus, what it is, how it works in Internet standards and when its use can become problematic.Modularity: Enabling Interoperability and Competition
Friday, 10 May 2024
Mandated interoperability is often highlighted as a way to improve competition on the Internet. However, most of the interoperability we see there today was established voluntarily: mandating it is relatively uncharted territory, with many potential pitfalls.No One Should Have That Much Power
Monday, 29 April 2024
It’s a common spy thriller trope. There’s a special key that can unlock something critical – business records, bank vaults, government secrets, nuclear weapons, maybe all of the above, worldwide.Considerations for AI Opt-Out
Sunday, 21 April 2024
Creating a Large Language Model (LLM) requires a lot of content – as implied by the name, LLMs need voluminous input data to be able to function well. Much of that content comes from the Internet, and early models have been seeded by crawling the whole Web.There Are No Standards Police
Wednesday, 13 March 2024
No one requires tech companies or open source projects to use most Internet standards, and no one requires people to use them either. This post explains why the voluntary nature of its standards are critical to the Internet's health.RFC 9518 - What Can Internet Standards Do About Centralisation?
Tuesday, 19 December 2023
RFC 9518: Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards has been published after more than two years of review, discussion, and revision.How to Run an Australian Web Site in 2024
Monday, 27 November 2023
A while back, the eSafety Commissioner declined to register the proposed Industry Codes that I’ve previously written about. Now, they’ve announced a set of Industry Standards that, after a comment period, will likely be law.Technical Standards Bodies are Regulators
Wednesday, 1 November 2023
There are lots of ways to view what Internet standards bodies like the IETF and W3C do. This post examines them as a type of regulator and explores what that means for how they operate.How we Build Platforms
Sunday, 19 February 2023
I’m fascinated by the Metaverse. Not because I want to use that steaming pile of legless avatars, but because it’s the latest prominent attempt to establish a new platform. As Mark Zuckerberg said in internal emails about it:What I Learned in Law School
Thursday, 5 January 2023
In the last decade or so, it’s become increasingly apparent that the Internet is going to be subject to more legal regulation. Because it’s a global network, this is tricky; fragmentation risk grows if regulation isn’t consistent between jurisdictions. And of course, there are all the other pitfalls of regulation — it’s difficult to agree on societal goals, much less change working systems to meet those goals without ill effect.A Safer, More Centralised Australian Internet
Sunday, 11 September 2022
There are many potential criticisms of the Online Safety Act 2021 (Cth)1. While my own concerns are mostly about whether there are appropriate checks and balances on the eSafety Commissioner’s powers, I will give credit where due; the current Commissioner’s implementation of it has – so far – demonstrated nuance and thoughtful balancing of the legislation’s goals with the preservation and enhancement of the unique properties that make the Internet so valuable to society. See, eg, ‘Explainer: The Online Safety Bill’, Digital Rights Watch. ↩What willwould a Chromium-only Web look like?
Wednesday, 22 June 2022
Most of the complexity and nuance of the Web is stuffed into browser engines. Even though they’re a huge burden to develop and maintain, the world is lucky enough to have three major ones, and they’re all Open Source.Yet More New HTTP Specs
Wednesday, 8 June 2022
The HTTP “core” documents were published on Monday, including a revision of HTTP semantics, caching, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and the brand-new HTTP/3. However, that’s not all that the HTTP community has been up to.A New Definition of HTTP
Monday, 6 June 2022
Seven and a half years ago, I wrote that RFC2616 is dead, replaced by RFCs 7230-5.Server-Sent Events, WebSockets, and HTTP
Sunday, 20 February 2022
The orange site is currently discussing an article about Server-Sent Events, especially as compared with WebSockets (and the emerging WebTransport). Both the article and discussion are well-informed, but I think they miss out on one aspect that has fairly deep implications.How the Next Layer of the Internet is Going to be Standardised
Monday, 21 June 2021
A big change in how the Internet is defined - and who defines it - is underway.No news is... a sign of a stagnating Internet
Thursday, 18 February 2021
Today, Facebook shut off the news in Australia – all of it, and much more besides. For example, when I tried to post a link to this blog entry on Facebook, they responded:RFC 8890 - The Internet is for End Users
Friday, 28 August 2020
The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) has published RFC8890, The Internet is for End Users, arguing that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) should ground its decisions in what’s good for people who use the Internet, and that it should take positive steps to achieve that.What limits legal access to cloud data in Australia?
Monday, 29 June 2020
The Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 20181 has proven controversial both before and after passage,2 with considerable debate about its industry assistance framework and its potential for systemically weakening encryption on the Internet - a framing emphasised by the explanatory memorandum which introduced the legislation as ‘measures to better deal with the challenges posed by ubiquitous encryption.’3 Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018 (Cth). ↩ See, eg, Stilgherrian, ‘What’s actually in Australia’s encryption laws? Everything you need to know’ ZDNet (online, 10 December 2018) https://www.zdnet.com/article/whats-actually-in-australias-encryption-laws-everything-you-need-to-know/. ↩ Explanatory Memorandum, Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018 (Cth), 2 [1]. ↩On RFC8674, the safe preference for HTTP
Thursday, 5 December 2019
It’s become common for Web sites – particularly those that host third-party or user-generated content – to make a “safe” mode available, where content that might be objectionable is hidden. For example, a parent who wants to steer their child away from the rougher corners of the Internet might go to their search engine and put it in “safe” mode.How Multiplexing Changes Your HTTP APIs
Sunday, 13 October 2019
When I first learned about SPDY, I was excited about it for several reasons, but near the top of the list was its potential impact on APIs that use HTTP.Moving Control to the Endpoints
Tuesday, 11 June 2019
The introduction of encrypted DNS is a natural step in the process of securing the Internet, but it has brought a considerable amount of controversy, because it removes a means of control for network operators -- including not only enterprises but also schools and parents. The solution is to move control of these services to the endpoints of communication -- for example, the users’ computers -- but doing so has its own challenges.Eight #aabill Predictions
Thursday, 6 December 2018
As I write this, the Australian Senate is in the final stages of passing the Assistance and Access Bill 2018 (with some but not all amendments).Australian Assistance and Access Bill 2018: Amendments
Thursday, 6 December 2018
In a great hurry, Australia’s house of representatives today passed the controversial Assistance and Access Bill 2018. However, there were some last-minute amendments slipped in. Currently, it’s being debated in the Senate.Designing Headers for HTTP Compression
Tuesday, 27 November 2018
One of the concerns that often comes up when someone creates a new HTTP header is how much “bloat” it will add on the network. This is especially relevant in requests, when a little bit of extra data can introduce a lot of latency when repeated on every request.Do you Trust Australia? Part Four
Thursday, 15 November 2018
On 20 August, I went to Canberra to participate in an Internet Society experts' panel on encryption.Do you Trust Australia? Part Three
Sunday, 19 August 2018
Not that long ago, the US government attempted to compel Microsoft to reveal a customer's data that was located in Ireland.Do you Trust Australia? Part Two
Thursday, 16 August 2018
After a couple of sleeps, I think my concerns about the proposed Assistance and Access Bill 2018 have crystallised.Do you Trust Australia?
Tuesday, 14 August 2018
This morning, the Australian Department of Home Affairs released the Assistance and Access Bill 2018 for consultation.How to Read an RFC
Tuesday, 31 July 2018
For better or worse, Requests for Comments (RFCs) are how we specify many protocols on the Internet. These documents are alternatively treated as holy texts by developers who parse them for hidden meanings, then shunned as irrelevant because they can’t be understood. This often leads to frustration and – more significantly – interoperability and security issues.How (Not) to Control Your CDN
Wednesday, 7 June 2017
In February, Omer Gil described the Web Cache Deception Attack.How to Think About HTTP Status Codes
Thursday, 11 May 2017
There’s more than a little confusion and angst out there about HTTP status codes. I’ve received more than a few e-mails (and IMs, and DMs) over the years from stressed-out developers (once at 2am, their time!) asking something like this:The State of Browser Caching, Revisited
Thursday, 16 March 2017
A long, long time ago, I wrote some tests using XmlHttpRequest to figure out how well browser caches behaved, and wrote up the results.Ideal HTTP Performance
Friday, 22 April 2016
The implicit goal for Web performance is to reduce end-user perceived latency; to get the page in front of the user and interactive as soon as possible.Alternative Services
Wednesday, 9 March 2016
The IESG has approved “HTTP Alternative Services” for publication as a Proposed Standard.Why 451?
Friday, 18 December 2015
Today, the IESG approved publication of “An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles”. It’ll be an RFC after some work by the RFC Editor and a few more process bits, but effectively you can start using it now.Will there be a Distributed HTTP?
Tuesday, 18 August 2015
One of the things that came up at the HTTP Workshop was “distributed HTTP” — i.e., moving the Web from a client/server model to a more distributed one. This week, Brewster Khale (of Archive.org fame) talked about similar thoughts on his blog and at CCC. If you haven’t seen that yet, I’d highly suggest watching the latter.Snowden Meets the IETF
Monday, 20 July 2015
Last night, we had a screening of CITIZENFOUR at the IETF meeting in Prague, and about 170 people showed up to see the movie about Edward Snowden’s relevations — information that led the IETF to declare such pervasive monitoring as an attack on the Internet itself.HTTP/2 Implementation Status
Monday, 15 June 2015
RFC 7540 has been out for about a month, so it seems like a good time for a snapshot of where HTTP/2 implementation is at.Improving Captive Portals
Wednesday, 25 March 2015
Yesterday at IETF92 in Dallas, we had a “Bar BoF” (i.e., informal meeting) about improving the behaviour and handling of Captive Portals — those login pages that you have to click through to get onto networks in hotels, airports, and many other places.HTTP/2 is Done
Wednesday, 18 February 2015
The IESG has formally approved the HTTP/2 and HPACK specifications, and they’re on their way to the RFC Editor, where they’ll soon be assigned RFC numbers, go through some editorial processes, and be published.Dissecting Australia's Proposed Data Retention Law
Monday, 19 January 2015
Much has been written about the societal impact of Australia’s proposed data retention laws (see some examples here and here) which I won’t repeat. However, they are quite interesting — and worrisome — from a more technical perspective.Why Intermediation is Important
Saturday, 27 December 2014
A few months ago I went to the Internet Governance Forum, looking to understand more about the IGF and its attendees. One of the things I learned there was a different definition of “intermediary” — one that I think the standards community should pay close attention to.Python 2 and TLS SNI
Saturday, 27 December 2014
Python 2.7.9 was recently released, and that means that it supports TLS Server Name Indication.What is the Web?
Thursday, 4 December 2014
This post is mostly for folks who haven’t been following Web standards closely — especially IETF folks. If you have been, there’s probably not much new here (but feel free to poke holes!).RFC2616 is Dead
Saturday, 7 June 2014
Don’t use RFC 2616. Delete it from your hard drives, bookmarks, and burn (or responsibly recycle) any copies that are printed out.Chrome and Stale-While-Revalidate
Sunday, 1 June 2014
Chrome is looking at adding support for RFC 5861’s stale-while-revalidate, which is really cool. I wrote about the details of SwR when it first became an RFC, but its application to browsers is something that’s a new. Seems like a good time to answer a few potential questions.If You Can Read This, You're SNIing
Friday, 9 May 2014
When TLS was defined, it didn’t allow more than one hostname to be available on a single IP address / port pair, leading to “virtual hosting” issues; each Web site (for example) now requires a dedicated IP address.How Many Package Managers Should I Support?
Monday, 5 May 2014
For whatever reason, my little hinclude JavaScript library is mildly popular. It’s just a bit of JS that you stick in a page to do declarative includes client-side; mostly, it was an experiment in doing composition a la ESI in the browser. However, Symfony picked it up, and since then, I’ve had a trickle of e-mails, issues and pull requests.Trying out TLS for HTTP:// URLs
Monday, 17 March 2014
The IETF now considers “pervasive monitoring” to be an attack. As Snowden points out, one of the more effective ways to combat it is to use encryption everywhere you can, and “opportunistic encryption” keeps on coming up as one way to help that.Nine Things to Expect from HTTP/2
Thursday, 30 January 2014
HTTP/2 is getting close to being real, with lots of discussions and more implementations popping up every week. What does a new version of the Web’s protocol mean for you? Here are some early answers:Strengthening HTTP: A Personal View
Saturday, 4 January 2014
Recently, one of the hottest topics in the Internet protocol community has been whether the newest version of the Web’s protocol, HTTP/2, will require, encourage or indeed say anything about the use of encryption in response to the pervasive monitoring attacks revealed to the world by Edward Snowden.Five Reasons to Considering Linking in Your HTTP APIs
Sunday, 23 June 2013
There’s been a lot of interest in and effort expended upon “hypermedia APIs” recently. However, I see a fair amount of resistance to it from developers and ops folks, because the pragmatic benefits aren’t often clear. This is as it should be, IMO; if you’re not able to describe concrete benefits without hand-waving about the “massive scale of the Web.”A Few Thoughts about PRISM
Friday, 21 June 2013
The NSA PRISM story broke while I was on the road; last week I was in Tokyo for W3C meetings, moving to San Francisco for a HTTP meeting and Velocity.Indicating Problems in HTTP APIs
Wednesday, 15 May 2013
A common part of HTTP-based APIs is telling the client that something has gone wrong. Most APIs do this in some fashion, whether they call it a “Fault” (very SOAP-y), “Error” or whatever.A Short Note
Sunday, 20 January 2013
In 2001, Charlie was born, and (understandably) we were freaking out a bit, having a new child and all. However, at about the same time, I met this really remarkable kid at the W3C, and I asked him what advice he could give me, from his perspective.Exploring Header Compression in HTTP/2.0
Friday, 4 January 2013
One of the major mechanisms proposed by SPDY for use in HTTP/2.0 is header compression. This is motivated by a number of things, but heavy in the mix is the combination of having more and more requests in a page, and the increasing use of mobile, where every packet is, well, precious. Compressing headers (separately from message bodies) both reduces the overhead of additional requests and of introducing new headers. To illustrate this, Patrick put together a synthetic test that showed that a set of 83 requests for assets on a page (very common these days) could be compressed down to just one round trip – a huge win (especially for mobile). You can also see the potential wins in the illustration that I used in my Velocity Europe talk."Why Don't You Just…"
Tuesday, 18 December 2012
A proposal by John Graham-Cumming is currently doing the rounds:HTTP Status: 101 Switching Protocols
Friday, 7 December 2012
The HTTPbis Working Group met in Atlanta last month; here’s how things are going.Evolving HTTP APIs
Tuesday, 4 December 2012
One of the most vexing problems that still seems to be facing people when I talk to them about HTTP APIs is how to handle versioning and extensibility – i.e., how they evolve.OPTIONS is Not the Method You're Looking For
Monday, 29 October 2012
Once in a while, people ask me whether they should use the OPTIONS HTTP method, and whether we should try to define formats for discovering resource capabilities with it.Production Notes
Sunday, 28 October 2012
I’ve (finally) moved this server to another Rackspace cloud server; same (small) size, but with a fresh OS.Caching POST
Monday, 24 September 2012
One of the changes in Apple’s release of iOS6 last week was a surprising new ability to cache POST responses.Why PATCH is Good for Your HTTP API
Wednesday, 5 September 2012
A common problem for APIs is partial update; when the client wants to change just one part of a resource’s state. For example, imagine that you’ve got a JSON representation of your widget resource that looks like:HTTP in Vancouver
Saturday, 4 August 2012
The HTTPBIS Working Group is in a transitional phase; we’re rapidly finishing our revision of the HTTP/1.1 specification and just getting steam up on our next target, HTTP/2.0.Bad HTTP API Smells: Version Headers
Wednesday, 11 July 2012
One thing I didn’t cover in my previous rant on HTTP API versioning is an anti-pattern that I’m seeing a disturbing number of APIs adopt; using a HTTP header to indicate the overall version of the API in use. Examples include CIMI, CDMI, GData and I’m sure many more.HTTP API Complexity
Monday, 25 June 2012
@dret: if your scenario is homogeneous and models are harmonized across participants, #REST is of limited utility for you.Profiles
Tuesday, 17 April 2012
Erik Wilde - otherwise known as dret - has published an Internet-Draft for a “profile” link relation type:User Personas for HTTP APIs
Saturday, 14 April 2012
When you’re designing HTTP APIs, you need to keep a lot of concerns in mind. Stealing a page from XP, let’s look at some possible personas and their user stories for HTTP-based APIs:JSON or XML: Just Decide
Friday, 13 April 2012
When people create HTTP APIs, one of the common decisions is about what format to use, usually revolving around “JSON or XML?”What's Next for HTTP
Saturday, 31 March 2012
We had two great meetings of the HTTPbis Working Group in Paris this week — one to start wrapping up our work on HTTP/1.1, and another to launch some exciting new work on HTTP/2.0.Linking in JSON
Friday, 25 November 2011
To be a full-fledged format on the Web, you need to support links – something sorely missing in JSON, which many have noticed lately.Web API Versioning Smackdown
Tuesday, 25 October 2011
A lot of bits have been used over on the OpenStack list recently about versioning the HTTP APIs they provide.Why ESI is Still Important, and How to Make it Better
Friday, 21 October 2011
More than ten years ago, I was working at Akamai and got involved in the specification of Edge Side Includes (ESI), sort of a templating language for intermediaries.Thinking about Namespaces in JSON
Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Since joining Rackspace to help out with OpenStack, one of the hot topics of conversation I’ve been involved in has been extensibility and versioning.RFC6266 and Content-Disposition
Friday, 2 September 2011
HTTPbis published RFC 6266 a little while ago, but the work isn’t finished.Better Browser Caching
Sunday, 28 August 2011
In discussing my whinge about AppCache offline with a few browser vendory folks, I ending up writing down my longstanding wishlist for making browser caches better. Without further ado, a bunch of blue-sky ideas;And now for something completely different... again.
Thursday, 25 August 2011
Today is my last day at Yahoo!, after five and a half years (yes, I got a gumball machine). It’s been a lot of fun and I wish all of the folks there that I’ve worked with over those years well; I’ve learned and done a lot, and Y! has given me a lot of room (both metaphorical as well as physical, given that for most of it, I’ve been more than 7,500 miles from my boss), which is much appreciated.Distributed Hungarian Notation doesn't Work
Wednesday, 24 August 2011
It used to be that when you registered a media type, a URI scheme, a HTTP header or another protocol element on the Internet, it was an opaque string that was a unique identifier, nothing more.HTTP Pipelining Today
Friday, 5 August 2011
Last week, Blaze.io highlighted how mobile browsers use HTTP pipelining.CSP
Wednesday, 27 July 2011
FYI, I’ve implemented Content Security Policy on this site. If your’e a Mozilla user, please tell me if you have any problems.What Proxies Must Do
Monday, 11 July 2011
The explosion of HTTP implementations isn’t just in clients and servers. An oft-overlooked but important part of the Web ecosystem is the intermediary, often called just a “proxy”*.Fixing AppCache
Sunday, 19 June 2011
HTML5’s AppCache mechanism is one confused little puppy. Purporting to be for taking web applications offline — a compelling and useful thing — it’s more often used by performance-hungry sites that want to use it as an online cache.Linked Cache Invalidation
Friday, 27 May 2011
After designing and deploying Cache Channels, it quickly became apparent that one Web cache invalidation mechanism wasn’t able to cover the breadth of use cases.On HTTP Load Testing
Wednesday, 18 May 2011
A lot of people seem to be talking about and performing load tests on HTTP servers, perhaps because there’s a lot more choice of servers these days.HTTP POST: IETF Prague Edition
Monday, 4 April 2011
Your REST worries have ended.
Tuesday, 22 March 2011
Now, you can test any URL to instantly determine if it’s RESTful.htracr in Two Minutes
Wednesday, 9 March 2011
I made a quick and dirty screencast to show off some of the newer features in htracr.Last Call: Content-Disposition
Tuesday, 1 March 2011
The IESG has received a request from the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Bis WG (httpbis) to consider the following document:Digging Deeper with htracr
Saturday, 27 November 2010
There’s a lot of current activity on the binding between HTTP and TCP; from pipelining to SPDY, the frontier of Web performance lives between these layers.HTTP Roundup: What’s Up with the Web’s Protocol
Friday, 1 October 2010
I’m going to try to start blogging more updates (kick me if I don’t!) about what’s happening in the world of HTTP.Thou Shalt Use TLS?
Friday, 23 July 2010
Since SPDY has surfaced, one of the oft-repeated topics has been its use of TLS; namely that the SPDY guys have said that they’ll require all traffic to go over it. Mike Belshe dives into all of the details in a new blog entry, but his summary is simple: “users want it.”Падручнік па кэшаванню
Wednesday, 30 June 2010
Patricia Clausnitzer has kindly translated the Caching Tutorial to Belarusian. Thanks!The Winter of Our Disconnect
Monday, 21 June 2010
A few weeks ago I was browsing through My Bookshop in Hawksburn, where on a whim I picked up The Winter of Our Disconnect by Susan Maushart. As I write this, I’m at 30,000 feet, and have just finished one of the more enjoyable and informative reads I’ve had in a while.Why Our New TV Doesn't Like the Web
Thursday, 3 June 2010
A while back we used an absurd amount of reward points from our credit card to get some Myer gift certificates, and on the weekend these miraculously turned into a new TV, the Sony 32EX600.RFC5861: HTTP Stale Controls
Thursday, 6 May 2010
On a bit of a roll, RFC5861: HTTP Stale Controls has (finally) been published as an Informational RFC.Thoughts on Archiving HTTP
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
Steve Souders and others have been working for a while on HAR, a HTTP Archive format.RFC 5785 - Well-Known URIs
Wednesday, 7 April 2010
One of the nagging theoretical problems in the Web architecture has been finding so-called “site-wide metadata”; i.e., finding something out about a Web site before you access it. We wrestled with this in P3P way back when, and the TAG took it up after that.Caching-Tutorial für Webautoren und Webmaster
Wednesday, 10 March 2010
Thomas Hühn has graciously translated the caching tutorial into German. Thanks!Are Resource Packages a Good Idea?
Thursday, 18 February 2010
Resource Packages is an interesting proposal from Mozilla folks for binding together bunches of related data (e.g., CSS files, JavaScript and images) and sending it in one HTTP response, rather than many, as browsers typically do.WS-REST (heh, heh)
Friday, 15 January 2010
If you haven’t seen it already, check out the Call for Papers for the First International Workshop on RESTful Design (WS-REST 2010), where I’m on the program committee, along with many of the usual suspects.HTTP + Politics = ?
Wednesday, 16 December 2009
Australia has apparently decided, through its elected leaders, to filter its own Internet connection.Will HTTP/2.0 Happen After All?
Friday, 13 November 2009
A couple of nights ago, I had a casual chat with Google’s Mike Belshe, who gave me a preview of how their “ Let’s make the Web faster” effort looks at HTTP itself.Traffic Server
Friday, 30 October 2009
A long time ago*, the word in high-performance proxy-caching was Inktomi’s Traffic Server. It was so fast it was referred to being “carrier grade” and this could be said without people smirking, and it was deployed by the likes of AOL, when AOL was still how most people accessed the Internet.RED gets a blog
Sunday, 12 July 2009
Just FYI, for those interested: RED now has a blog detailing news and other developments. I’ll still post about it here occaisionally, but most RED-related things are going over there…Come to the Stockholm IETF!
Friday, 3 July 2009
The Stockholm IETF meeting is shaping up to be an interesting one (and not just because it’s in such a beautiful city).The Resource Expert Droid
Thursday, 25 June 2009
A (very) long time ago, I wrote a piece of software called the Cacheability Engine to help people figure out how a Web cache would treat their sites. It has a few bugs, but is generally useful for that purpose.What to Look For in a HTTP Proxy/Cache
Friday, 12 June 2009
Part of my job is maintaining Yahoo!’s build of Squid and supporting its users, which use it to serve everything from the internal Web services that make sites go to serving Flickr’s images.Opera Turbo
Friday, 5 June 2009
HTTP performance is a hot topic these days, so it’s interesting that Opera has announced a “turbo” feature in Opera 10 Beta;Counting the ways that rev="canonical" hurts the Web
Tuesday, 14 April 2009
I had a lovely holiday weekend in Canberra with the family, without Web access. Perhaps I’ll blog about that soon — Canberra being in my opinion one of the nicest overlooked cities in the world — but that will have to wait. Going offline for a few days always brings a certain dread of what one’s inbox will hold when you get back, and this one was no exception.The FSF, IETF and Use Patents
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
Over the past few weeks the Free Software Foundation has had its knickers in a twist about TLS authentication — specifically, its patent encumbrance;Caching When You Least Expect it
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
There’s a rule of thumb about when a HTTP response can be cached; the Caching Tutorial says:Cobbler / children / shoes / etc.
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
Rob Sayre points out that this blog still doesn’t show a preference for Atom, embarrassingly enough.Stop it with the X- Already!
Wednesday, 18 February 2009
UPDATE: RFC 6648 is now the official word on this topic.OAuth in Minneapolis
Friday, 21 November 2008
There are lots of new “Web 2.0” specs emerging — many beginning with “o” — that are both exciting and concerning.Dev-Friendly Web Caching
Monday, 27 October 2008
Ryan Tomayko announces Rack::Cache, a HTTP cache for Ruby’s generic Web API;/site-meta
Thursday, 16 October 2008
Metadata discovery is a nagging problem that’s been hanging around the Web for a while. There have been a few stabs at this problem (including at least one by yours truly), but no real progress.The WS-Empire Strikes Back... feebly
Friday, 4 July 2008
Here’s a gem on a little-used mailing list:The Pitfalls of Debugging HTTP
Thursday, 22 May 2008
Some folks at work were having problems debugging HTTP with LWP ’s command-line GET utility; it turned out that it was inserting Link headers — HTTP headers, mind you — for each HTML <link> element present.Atom gets a new audience
Thursday, 15 May 2008
Huh. The Atom Format RFC has been out for a while, and as one of the authors, I get the odd mail now and again asking a question or just saying “thanks.”Moving the Goalposts: “Use” Patents and Standards
Wednesday, 2 April 2008
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 to any of them, as the purpose of this post* is not to pick on any single one**.Moving Beyond Methods in REST
Thursday, 20 March 2008
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 for exposing the full range of the protocol; some frameworks are even starting to align object models with resource models, where HTTP methods map to method calls on things with identity. Good stuff.DAV WTF?
Monday, 3 March 2008
Not many people that I know outside of IETF circles realise that a new *DAV effort has started up; CardDAV.POST and PATCH
Sunday, 17 February 2008
It’s 7am, I’m sitting in the Auckland Koru Club on my way home and reading the minor kerfuffle regarding PATCH with interest.Another Kind of HTTP Negotiation
Wednesday, 6 February 2008
Here’s one that I’ve been wondering about for a while, for the LazyWeb (HTTP Geek Edition);Watching WADL (and other rambling thoughts)
Monday, 21 January 2008
I’m following the discussion of RESTful Web description in general, and WADL in particular, with both difficulty and interest (see Patrick and Joe’s thoughts for a nice contrast).Cache Channels
Friday, 4 January 2008
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 about a much more ambitious project — Cache Channels.Two HTTP Caching Extensions
Wednesday, 12 December 2007
We use caching extensively inside Yahoo! to improve scalability, latency and availability for back-end HTTP services, as I’ve discussed before.Why Revise HTTP?
Sunday, 9 December 2007
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 get RFC2616 — the HTTP specification — revised.WADL Documentation XSLT Updated
Friday, 2 November 2007
I’ve updated the WADL documentation stylesheet, primarily to:5005
Saturday, 8 September 2007
Feed Paging and Archiving (nee Feed History) has finally made it to a standards-track RFC.ETags, ETags, ETags
Tuesday, 7 August 2007
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 for RESTfulness, as the defining factor of HTTP’s caching model, and much more.URI Templates Redux
Saturday, 28 July 2007
URI Templates -01 is now an Internet-Draft.The State of Proxy Caching
Wednesday, 20 June 2007
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 handled by common implementations, they’d be able to trust caches a bit more.Expires vs. max-age
Tuesday, 15 May 2007
I occasionally get a question from readers of the caching tutorial about whether to use the Expires header or Cache-Control: max-age to control a response’s freshness lifetime.Intelligent Design, Eames-Style
Thursday, 10 May 2007
For a while, I’ve had the fairly well-known Charles Eames quote “Design depends largely on constraints” as the tagline on my blog (if you read this in a feed aggregator, you’ll have to go to one of the HTML pages to see it).httperf rev
Tuesday, 1 May 2007
Martin Arlitt makes an exciting announcement;Squid is My Service Bus
Sunday, 29 April 2007
My 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 everyone’s heard enough about the high-level benefits of HTTP and not nearly enough details of what it does on the ground. So, I decided to concentrate on one aspect of the value that we get from using HTTP for services; intermediation, as an example.WWW2007 Developers’ Track
Thursday, 5 April 2007
We’ve announced the program for this years’ Developers’ Track, and I’m very excited about the lineup.REST Issues, Real and Imagined
Tuesday, 27 February 2007
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 of their projects. Time and time again, I’ve seen folks who are new to REST get caught up on small stuff like this;Pipes!
Wednesday, 7 February 2007
Yahoo! (finally!) released Pipes as a beta today; congrats to the very talented team that put this together.Developers, Developers, Developers
Wednesday, 7 February 2007
A reminder: proposals for the Developers’ Track at WWW2007 should be in by February 16th.Schema for JSON
Thursday, 30 November 2006
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 benefits; after all, look at the mess that XML Schema is in.Friday Fun: I Hate Cookies
Friday, 27 October 2006
There are plenty of reasons to hate HTTP Cookies, but there’s one thing that especially annoys me; their syntax.URI Templating, the Spec
Wednesday, 4 October 2006
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 convey a URI itself. I took a stab at this in the Link Header draft, and have also been working in the background with DeWitt Clinton, Joe Gregorio, Marc Hadley, Dave Orchard, and James Snell on a more general specification, URI Templates, the first draft of which we (finally!) got published today.Surfing the Barcoded Web
Saturday, 16 September 2006
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 logical conclusion, everything should be barcode-enabled, by Web-enabling it.Some Questions for Software Vendors
Wednesday, 13 September 2006
Everyone seems to be gushing about Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise. While any headway is good in the horrible landscape that is Intellectual Property, my initial reaction is that it — like most such vendor promises — is too little, too late.Caching Performance Notes
Monday, 21 August 2006
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.Putting the Web back in Web 2.0
Monday, 14 August 2006
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 think AJAX is in severe need of some serious Webizing.Bringing Back the Link - With a Twist
Thursday, 22 June 2006
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 more, it’s necessary to use hyperlinks — the foundation of the Web — to tie resources together, without getting in users’ faces.Web Services are Dead, Long Live Web Services
Thursday, 25 May 2006
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 using HTTP; SOAP isn’t assumed (or preferred).Caching Web 2.0
Tuesday, 16 May 2006
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 talk; it’s just a synthesis of a few different observations;The State of Browser Caching
Thursday, 11 May 2006
Updated 2006-06-03Vendor-pires
Wednesday, 10 May 2006
Anne-Thomas Manes extolls the virtues of WS-*;DOM vs. Web
Thursday, 20 April 2006
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 on today’s Web.Bug Syncronicity
Thursday, 13 April 2006
I’ve had a lyric running through my head for the last day or so, thanks to a couple of bugs.Are Namespaces (and mU) Necessary?
Friday, 7 April 2006
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 extensibility is through URI-based namespaces, along with a flag to tell consumers when an extension needs to be understood (a.k.a. mustUnderstand).Don’s False Choice
Monday, 20 March 2006
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 the RESTifarian world into two; “hi” and “lo.”Feed History Redux
Wednesday, 1 March 2006
Over the weekend, I submitted a new draft of Feed History.Invalidating Caches with POST
Saturday, 18 February 2006
Have you ever posted a comment to a blog, found it missing, so you re-posted it, only to find two entries? Annoying, huh?Offline
Tuesday, 7 February 2006
Interesting; there are not one but two sessions at the upcoming ETech about taking Web applications offline.How Web-Ready is XMLHttpRequest?
Monday, 23 January 2006
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 the interface exposed is pretty much the same, what it does in the background is very different, especially with regards to HTTP.RFC 4229: HTTP Header Field Registrations
Saturday, 24 December 2005
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 do it; IANA’s Message header registry and repository have been filled with HTTP-related headers by RFC 4229.RFC 4287: The Atom Syndication Format
Monday, 5 December 2005
Atom has finally realised its most important advantage over the various flavours of RSS — it’s a Standards-Track RFC.Leveraging the Web: Caching
Saturday, 26 November 2005
The first in an occasional series about the real-world benefits of REST and the Web architecture, as applied to HTTP.REST vs..?
Monday, 7 November 2005
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 services.Why Just GET and POST?
Saturday, 22 October 2005
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 something like Flock, surely we could at least support all of HTTP’s methods.Feed History -04
Monday, 5 September 2005
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 bit clearer.Feed History -03
Monday, 15 August 2005
Draft -03 of Feed History: Enabling Stateful Syndication is now available. Significant changes include:Separating the Data Model from its Serialisation
Wednesday, 10 August 2005
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 working groups, where hours — no, days — can be spent agonizing over whether to make something an attribute or an element.HTTP Performance (again)
Monday, 8 August 2005
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 make a lot of sense — if you accept the premise that SOAP (and Web services) is about integration with existing applications.Who Do We Work For?
Saturday, 23 July 2005
The FT Global 500 is pretty much what you see when you look up “capitalistic orgy” in the dictionary. It’s a compilation of the largest 500 mega-corporations in the world, as measured by the market.Making Syndication Enterprise-Grade
Saturday, 16 July 2005
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 even blogging will change in nature as it gets more popular; people will be using blogs to fundamentally change the way they do business, inside and outside the firewall.One Description to Bind them All? Nah.
Friday, 8 July 2005
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 — develop specialised jargon as a shorthand for concepts that are well-understood in that field. It gives greater precision, easier flow of ideas, and yes, it raises the bar to entry for newcomers.Perspectives on the Addressing Experiment
Monday, 27 June 2005
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 the W3C, so I gave an update on its progress as part of a panel discussion at the Advisory Committee meeting a few weeks ago. I’d like to share some of what I presented there.Web Description at the W3C
Tuesday, 24 May 2005
The W3C has just started a mailing list for discussion of Web description formats;Prefetching (again)
Sunday, 22 May 2005
There’s been quite a kerfuffle over Google’s Web Accelerator, because it prefetches Web content.WADLing towards Web Description
Wednesday, 18 May 2005
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 language yet.Google's Cache-Control Extensions
Thursday, 12 May 2005
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;Greasemonkey and the Web
Monday, 9 May 2005
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 Web, philosophically.Questions Leading to a Web Description Format
Friday, 29 April 2005
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 new one is required.Try This RSS Experiment
Tuesday, 12 April 2005
Way back when I put the first Atom drafts together, I included a placeholder for a section that I hoped would allow reconstruction of feed state. Presently, this often isn’t necessary, because you have to be away for a seriously long time (e.g, on vacation) before you actually miss anything. However, I’d put forth that this state of grace is going to be increasingly unlikely.A Call to OPTIONS
Sunday, 3 April 2005
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 about a resource, the HTTP OPTIONS method, is not widely enabled by current implementations.Nevermore
Monday, 21 March 2005
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 bit busy, and because I wanted to do some implementation of a more general HTTP framework before I wrote a more formal document.The Map is Not the Territory
Monday, 7 February 2005
Werner makes an excellent point;JSON and XML
Monday, 24 January 2005
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 path; by leveraging the serialisation of data structures in ECMAScript (nee JavaScript) — a nearly ubiquitous language, on every desktop that has a browser — they get an automatic installed base and at least one API for free.On How Google Fixed Comment Spam
Wednesday, 19 January 2005
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 doing this as well.text/python?
Wednesday, 15 December 2004
I’m thinking about whether it would be a good idea to have a media type for Python source files, call it “text/python.”Is there a Web Services Architecture?
Wednesday, 29 September 2004
As I’m sure many others were, I was intrigued to see that Microsoft published their idea of an Introduction to the Web Services Architecture and Its Specifications the other week.The ‘Document’ in Document-Oriented Messaging
Thursday, 5 August 2004
(Another instalment in “XML Heresies.”)The Whole Web in a Python Dictionary
Saturday, 31 July 2004
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 for a while; coming up with some Python APIs for HTTP that are usable, encourage good practice, and well-aligned with the specifications.Dictionary as API?
Monday, 26 July 2004
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 look of it.Web-izing The Finder
Sunday, 18 July 2004
Timbl has talked about Web-izing databasesand languages; what about operating systems? Despite Microsoft’s legal troubles brought about trying to integrate the browser into Windows, it’s a good idea.SOAP: Protocol or Format?
Wednesday, 30 June 2004
Way back when the XML Protocol Working Group started kicking around, Henrik and I had a long-running, low-level “discusssion” about whether SOAP was a protocol or a format.What?
Wednesday, 16 June 2004
Check out the W eb H ypertext A pplication T echnology Working Group; it looks like our last, best hope for extending the browser platform to grow the Web.Use Cases for Web Description Formats
Monday, 14 June 2004
One thing about Web description formats that hasn’t seen much discussion yet is how people intend to use them.WebDAV Access Control Protocol
Friday, 28 May 2004
RFC 3744 has been published:XML Infoset, RDF and Data Modelling
Friday, 28 May 2004
I’ve been talking with a few people about my previous assertion that the Infoset is a bad abstraction for data modelling, and my subsequent post about the informational properties of the Infoset.The Syndication Sky is Falling!
Tuesday, 18 May 2004
A few people got together in NYC to talk about Atom going to the W3C this morning. One part of the minutes of this discussion raised my eyebrows a fair amount;sparta.py 0.4: Data Binding for RDF in Python
Saturday, 15 May 2004
After a short pause (OK, nearly three years), I’ve released version 0.4 of sparta.py.Informational Properties of Infosets
Wednesday, 12 May 2004
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the influences that using the Infoset has on the information you place in it.Boo!
Wednesday, 5 May 2004
Without pointing fingers, some people have a bee in their collective bonnet about the dangers of allowing binary content to be represented in XML, care of XOP. Others are up in arms about re-inventing HTTP in SOAP, courtesy of the Representation Header. Both of these are products of the XML Protocol WG, of which I’m a member, so I’d like to share my viewpoint (which is not that of either my employer nor the working group, etc., ad nauseam).Go PATCH Go
Monday, 3 May 2004
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.Using WebDAV as a Description Format for REST
Tuesday, 27 April 2004
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.Asynchrony: There Is No Spoon
Monday, 19 April 2004
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 the server needs to contact the client at some arbitrary time in the future” they say.Describing Generative Identifiers in WSDL
Friday, 16 April 2004
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, with HTTP I might describe an address book where someone named “Jones” has a corresponding entry URI;Five Favourite Protocol Design Papers
Thursday, 15 April 2004
Lots of papers come and go over the years; take a look at any tech conference, online bibliographies (even subject-specific ones; Webbib is a favourite), and you’ll be inundated.A(nother) Description Format for REST
Wednesday, 14 April 2004
I’ve talked before about describing RESTful Web resources, going as far as prototyping a new format. That work was predicated on the assumption that WSDL wasn’t adequate.Elegance in Integration
Friday, 9 April 2004
Elegance in integration is multiplicity — solving one problem in ways that aid another. Elegance is optimization. Elegance is assembly — an apparatus readily put together and taken apart. Elegance is tolerance-ordering, where tolerance means uncertainty in some manufacturing operations. Elegance is simplification. As engineering designs evolve, they gain false sophistication — empty but seductive ingenuities. Ruthlessly, agonizingly, these must be stripped away. Elegance, finally, is work-arounds — minimizing the risks, endemic to all [projects], of… failures or costly delays during fabrication.Behind the Scenes at Your (very) Local Music Store
Monday, 29 March 2004
Aaron Swartz has started to document the iTunes Music Store; this is a good example of a non-browser, cross-platform application reusing HTTP. It would be interesting to see the interface documented on a per-URI basis.Growing the Web
Sunday, 28 March 2004
Ian Hickson is thinking about client-side technologies (scroll down a bit). Some of his ideas resonated;Outage in the Web: Server Configuration
Wednesday, 17 March 2004
In an otherwise excellent article, Jon Udell blames the lack of one-click subscribe in syndication formats on lack of vision:The Problem With Infosets
Sunday, 7 March 2004
An interesting issue poked its head up at the W3C Technical Plenary last week. XML Protocol (known as SOAP to mere mortals) is defined in terms of XML Infosets — it describes how to move Infosets around and process them, as the basis of Web services.Caching Tutorial Update
Sunday, 15 February 2004
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 aren’t any substantial changes; this is mostly tweaking and incorporation of new information.XOP and MTOM
Saturday, 14 February 2004
The XML Protocol Working Group (of which I’m a member) has released a first draft of XOP, XML-binary Optimised Packaging, and a revised draft of MTOM, the Message Transmission Optimisation Mechanism, that leverages XOP.Messages vs. Files
Saturday, 7 February 2004
Jon Udell is thinking about the benefits of data being globally available, rather than localised to a machine. I’m in complete agreement; in the last two years, I’ve used Linux, Windows and Mac OSX on the desktop, leading me to be ruthless about data portability.Legal Implications of Feedback on Weblogs
Sunday, 25 January 2004
As alluded to before, you’re taking on legal risk when you allow people to say things to you. Yes, this is crazy, but hey, it’s the US legal system. Go figure.iTMS does RSS
Thursday, 22 January 2004
This is the way syndication should be; user-customisable and aligned with the Web view of the resources it talks about. Cool.©
Thursday, 22 January 2004
Over the past month or two, I’ve been noticing a little link on larger news organizations’ Web articles, such as that of the New York Times and Christian Science Monitor.Decentralised Registration
Monday, 12 January 2004
Wouldn’t it be great if, whenever a business, government organization or just the guy down the block came up with a new format for their documents, they could easily get a media type, so that the format would be a first-class citizen on the Web?Extensibility and Interoperability
Saturday, 3 January 2004
In his blog, Sean McGrath wonders about two potentially competing faces of standards; extensibility and interoperability.The Semantic Web’s Dirty Little Secret
Tuesday, 30 December 2003
Browse through the W3C Semantic Web pages and you’ll see this notice in a few different forms:Comment Spam and Google
Monday, 29 December 2003
Hyperlinks have been disallowed in comment bodies on this blog for a while now, and I’ve just removed the link associated with comment authors as well.Notes on Atom
Friday, 12 December 2003
As you may know, I’m editing the Atom format draft in my copious spare time, but not actively participating in the community (I am watching, but I don’t have the time to really dig in).Why Do Web Server APIs Suck So Much?
Monday, 8 December 2003
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.A Description Format for REST
Sunday, 7 December 2003
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 the point” ;) but I have been noodling on something for my own purposes.The New RDF
Sunday, 7 December 2003
I spent a little time on the plane the other day reading the latest WD of the RDF Primer. I didn’t attempt to review the entire document set, as reading a 71 page primer is quite enough!QNames are Evil
Saturday, 6 December 2003
How’s this analogy:RSS-Data and Web services
Friday, 3 October 2003
Jeremy Allaire is writing about something he calls RSS-Data, and I must say it touches on a lot of interesting points. A few;Loose Coupling, Late Binding and REST
Friday, 3 October 2003
Mark Baker says that REST is SOA + late binding. While I see the truth in this, I think it’s pretty orthogonal, and it’s not that compelling for most SOAish folks.Modularity by reference
Thursday, 2 October 2003
Many XML-based formats could benefit from using references to promote modularity. For example, imagine a catalogue format;RSS and E-mail
Wednesday, 24 September 2003
Tim Bray wonders what the difference between an RSS feed delivered via HTTP and an e-mail folder (e.g., via IMAP) is; I’ve wondered the same thing myself. As far as I can tell;Click Submit Only Once
Saturday, 13 September 2003
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); “Click Submit Only Once” is intended to stop that. The problem is, it puts me and every other shopper between a rock and a hard place.Frank Chu update
Thursday, 28 August 2003
As previously noted, I often pass San Francisco figure Frank Chu on the way to and from work.Atomic Draft
Sunday, 24 August 2003
Somehow, I’ve been drafted into editing the Atom syntax specification, and have just thrown up a first draft.Registering Media Types
Saturday, 23 August 2003
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 register a media type for RSS, and has continued to grow as I attempt to do the same for SOAP, on behalf of the XML Protocol Working Group.HTTP Performance
Thursday, 21 August 2003
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 that therefore other protocols (usually proprietary or platform-specific systems that those same people happen to sell) are needed to “unleash the power of Web services.”Structured URIs
Monday, 11 August 2003
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 the emphasis on authorities’ ability to embed metadata in URIs.Subversion
Tuesday, 29 July 2003
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 he says that I disagree with (and it might just be a misunderstanding) is in regard to a need for a Subversion-specific client cache; the whole point of doing this with Web protocols it to avoid application-specific infrastructure. A well-designed WebDAV cache should work equally well for any application, not just Subversion.httpRange-14
Tuesday, 29 July 2003
Mark Baker is the latest in a series to weigh in on the TAG issue regarding what a HTTP URI can identify.Caching PUT
Saturday, 26 July 2003
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 your choice, and then drag-and-drop them into what MSFT has called “Web folders.”Profiling HTTP
Friday, 25 July 2003
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).The RSS Advisory Board
Friday, 18 July 2003
Dave Winer has announced a few changes to RSS, which seem positive at first glance, but need a little closer inspection.Too much money, not enough sense
Thursday, 10 July 2003
Adam Curry explains how he’s bought placement in RSS aggregators. Trouble is, RSS isn’t universally supported, as evidenced by the echo project, and he feels cheated.Caching is often enough
Saturday, 28 June 2003
I feel compelled to respond to Norm Walsh’s thoughts on caching.Starting Fresh
Tuesday, 24 June 2003
Sam Ruby suggests a roadmap for a new effort that may very well replace RSS.Bees and Ants
Tuesday, 24 June 2003
The W3C Semantic Web wiki has an entry called ‘BeesAndAnts’ that very effectively conveys something that I’ve been trying to articulate for a while (and, as usual, failing). It’s not about the Semantic Web in my mind, so much as it’s about REST and Web Services (which means that there’s something to this Web architecture stuff yet, I think).Identifying RSS-Like Formats
Thursday, 12 June 2003
I’m surprised by Dave Winer’s continuing reluctance to identify RSS 2.0 with a namespace, given how strongly he feels about interoperability and respecting format definitions.Newest Toy
Friday, 6 June 2003
Got the Palm Tungsten T the other day ($309 from buy.com, - $50 trade-in). Nifty, much better than the aging handspring I was toting around.XCAP
Thursday, 29 May 2003
Jonathan Rosenberg published a new Internet-Draft, XCAP, to the SIMPLE Working Group in the IETF. Here’s the skinny:One-Man Standards
Wednesday, 28 May 2003
Dave Winer argues that RSS implementers should toe the line:RSS, Subscribers and Business Models (oh, my!)
Sunday, 25 May 2003
Tim Bray thinks out loud about mechanisms to allow RSS subscribers to be counted. His poison of choice is adding a query components to the URI in the Referrer header.A sign of bad times?
Friday, 16 May 2003
Hmm. Passed the 12 Galaxies guy on the way home from work today. Usually, he’s very polite and keeps to himself. This time, he was yelling at passers by and waving his sign at him. Violently.Are we bored of RSS Standardization yet?
Sunday, 11 May 2003
Don wants to send RSS to OASIS, of all places. Doesn’t that mean it’ll have to be corporations standardizing it? Urgh.RSS Profiling Wiki
Saturday, 10 May 2003
Don, Sam, Ben, Mena and others have started blogging about a profile of RSS.Semantic Syndication
Saturday, 3 May 2003
Excellent. Danny Ayers proposes a Simple Semantic Resolution RSS 2.0 Module.RSS Traffic Characterisation
Saturday, 3 May 2003
I’m setting up a weblog for a fairly well-known colleague, and doing some traffic estimates to try to size his server.RSS Schema and dates
Tuesday, 29 April 2003
Sam mentions dc:date; that’s what I was thinking, except that ‘date’ on its own is pretty useless. As Bill points out, dcterms gives you different date semantics.Sam wants namespaces
Tuesday, 22 April 2003
Sam proposes some changes to RSS 2.0 regarding namespaces. My first question was, “why?” but upon reading his next post, I get it.RSS needs Profiling
Tuesday, 22 April 2003
Tim says that RSS Needs Fixing. Right on! Some people are intereted in endless tinkering with RSS - I’m not. I’m interested in putting it on everybody’s desktop, and making it transparent to them. This means we need better interop.Let's try this.
Friday, 18 April 2003
RSS needs a bit of stablity (as I’ve often said), so I’ve gotten off of my duff and done something about it.RSS standardization (again)
Tuesday, 25 March 2003
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, my effort to register an RSS media type was stalled by the lack of a stable spec published by a recognized group.Interestinger and interestinger...
Tuesday, 21 January 2003
So all the sudden everybody’s talking about RSS again. It came up spontaneously at work - DaveO proclaimed “I’m totally getting into RSS” unprompted the other day. Very cool. Now Tim Bray is pondering the future of RSS. Interestinger still.Switching
Wednesday, 11 December 2002
Aaron points out the Apple Switch commercial starring Yo Yo Ma. Cool; how long before we see a Switch ad with TBL? :)RSS Wishes
Sunday, 8 December 2002
Wouldn’t it be great if The Royal Society, the Commonwealth Club and your local council all had RSS feeds available, conspiquous and up-to-date?Mozilla Prefetching
Wednesday, 27 November 2002
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 notable exception) is that prefetching is a bad approach.Eh?
Tuesday, 26 November 2002
Hixie, Mark and others are talking about serving up application/xhtml+xml selectively to browsers.RSS XP
Monday, 25 November 2002
RSS: XHTML Profile, to me, is another proof that syntax isn’t important, as long as you can boil whatever you get down to a format you know. Nice job!New toys
Sunday, 17 November 2002
We just replaced our phones with Sony Ericsson T300s with T-Mobile; sooo cool.RDF Model and Syntax
Saturday, 16 November 2002
Jack William Bell makes a precise, short and readable effort at explaining why RDF is simple and important.IETF Transparency
Sunday, 10 November 2002
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, but at least you have some idea of what’s going on, instead of being left out in the cold.Macrosoft?
Thursday, 12 September 2002
Jeremy Allaire talks about establishing a “rich client” platform because HTML is “stagnant.” Two questions; will it be standards-based, and what about SVG?RSS 0.94
Tuesday, 3 September 2002
I see Dave is once again rev’ing RSS. I have reservations about the some of the new mechanisms (e.g., shoe-horning MIME into XML is a horrible idea) but I’m encouraged by hints that using XML Namespaces is being considered. IMHO the smart thing for Dave to do would be to start a version of “Minimal RSS”; maybe 0.95, that is just the very, very core markup (say, title, link and description, maybe one or two others for channel metadata) and put EVERYTHING else in modules (coordinating the release of them with the spec). This would produce a very stable core spec that would allow him to experiment with new facilities with impunity, whilst strengthening 0.9x’s position; my impression is that most people use 1.0 because of Namepaces, not RDF.Buzz - Continuing thoughts on F2F
Monday, 26 August 2002
One of the most intriguing parts of this, to me, is section 3.1.2; “How people meet: being in the in-group.” Possibly because I’m usually not in the in-group… Storper theorizes that F2F communication is necessary to maintain the boundaries of the in-group, so that one who has been ejected can’t rejoin, but AaronSW pointed out that IRC has a similar function without F2F. Fascinating. I wonder what the intersection of this and the Advogato trust metric is, along with a project-oriented community like SourceForge?RDF and RSS
Saturday, 24 August 2002
Interesting; I’m glad thiswas written, because RDF is good stuff, and this is a good walkthrough.Face-to-face communications
Saturday, 24 August 2002
This article (you can google for the original paper) is, to me, pivotal to emerging Web standards. Both Semantic Web and Web Services are about machine-to-machine communication; the promise that machines will be able to act as an agent, and to integrate business processes, respectively (yes, there’s a lot more to each). The question is, when will people trust and actually use machines to do this? If Storper’s paper is correct, the pie-in-the-sky visions of a ‘Web of Trust’ and those of dynamic markets of smart Web Services are both without ground. To me, this is a good thing; both technologies have significant benefits to offer the world, if they’ll just get their heads out of the clouds and back down to earth.