Gadgetopia

Related to Joe's post about Microsoft's RSS bandwidth issues, I'm seeing a lot of talk about the blogosphere about an RFC from January 2002: RFC 3229, "Delta encoding in HTTP." The idea behind this RFC is to just send the deltas the changes between a current document and ...

Thirty five years ago today, the first ever RFC was filed with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). RFC 1 describes software and protocols for transferring data on the planned ARPA Network. During the summer of 1968, representatives from the initial four sites met several times to discuss the HOST ...

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but I got to thinking today about the major protocol and language that drive the Web HTTP and HTML and I reflected on the fact that this pair is essentially frozen in time. There hasn't been a major update to either of ...

Since everyone but the janitor started blogging at Microsoft, they've been aggregating their blogs into one big honkin' feed that I call The Fire Hose, since reading it is like trying to drink from a fire hose. I find some interesting stories occasionally, but I probably missed 50 since I ...

Here's a crazy little tidbit that you should probably never use on a normal web page: Thanks to RFC 2397, some browsers include the 'data:' url type, which lets you embed data resources right in your page. For instance, the image attached to this post looks like this: Mozilla folks ...

Example Web Page: Did anyone else know about this? "You have reached this web page by typing 'example.com', 'example.net', or 'example.org' into your web browser. These domain names are reserved for use in documentation and are not available for registration. See RFC 2606, Section 3." It's right there in the ...

HTTP/1.1: Header Field Definitions: Did you ever wonder why the HTTP_REFERER header is missspelled? (You did know that "referrer" is actually spelled with two "r"'s, right?) It turns out that the misspelling harkens back to the HTTP spec, as linked above. That link is to the 1.1 spec, but in ...

HTTP/1.1: Security Considerations: Regarding my earlier post about the Outlook Web Access privacy issue, here's what I found about HTTP Referer headers in the HTTP 1.1 spec (RFC 2616): Because the source of a link might be private information or might reveal an otherwise private information source, it is strongly ...