mark nottingham

Internet and Web

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.

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.

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.

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!).

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.

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.

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.