When
· Naughties
· · 2005
· · · January
· · · · 25 (3 entries)
Stronger Foundations · The Net today is standing on slightly firmer foundations than it was a few weeks back. On December 15th, the W3C issued Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One as a “Recommendation”, i.e. as close as they get to calling anything a standard. If you read it, there’s a lot of focus on URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers, as in what we usually confuse with the Universal Republic of Love). Today saw the final publication of the URI specification as RFC3986, also known (even more impressively) as IETF Internet Standard #66; some of the IETF’s most widely-deployed protocols never make it to “Full Standard” status. I’m hopelessly biased because I helped write both of these documents, but I think that each is individually important and that the combination is really important. Most people can’t possibly imagine how much work it is to grind these things out, and how many revisions it takes to get one right. I originally wrote all of what is now Section 6 of RFC3986, and I think there are very few sentences in there that haven’t been updated a few times, almost all for the better, and almost all the work was done by Roy Fielding, who deserves a deep bow from us all. The Internet and the Web aren’t things and they’re not places, they’re a mesh of agreements that allow us to talk to each other and to be less stupid. These two documents are important links in that mesh.
Open Solaris · Hey, the OpenSolaris web site is up! You cannot possibly imagine how much work this has taken, and there’s still lots to do. I’m happy to see that this kind of major technology push comes with a list of blogs as a matter of course. Speaking of which, the hardcore geeks in the crowd who want to get an insider’s feel for what this whole Solaris thing is really about can bypass all the business-oriented official marketing stuff and go straight to Bryan Cantrill’s excellent Solaris 10 Revealed, which will give you all the technical details you could possibly want.
Private Syndication · Over at the ZD BTL space, David Berlind writes good stuff on something I’ve been talking about for a long time, private syndication feeds. My favorite examples have been feeds from my bank account or credit card or stock portfolio, but David has another for people like EBay, who can no longer email their customers because everyone receiving such an email assumes it’s a phishing attempt (it usually is). David wonders if existing RSS-based systems can scale up for mass one-to-one usage; the answer is “yes, obviously”; post-and-poll (as in syndication) is mechanically simpler than store-and-forward (as in email), it’ll scale just fine. One detail: I think that for this kind of content-critical, all-business feed, Atom is a more attractive choice than any of the RSS flavors.
