mark nottingham

Internet and Web

What RSS Needs

Web feeds could be so much more if we put some effort into them. This post explores some ideas of how to start.

Are Internet Standards Competitive or Collaborative?

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

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

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.

No One Should Have That Much Power

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.

There Are No Standards Police

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?

RFC 9518: Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards has been published after more than two years of review, discussion, and revision.

Technical Standards Bodies are Regulators

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.

What willwould a Chromium-only Web look like?

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

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?

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

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

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

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.