sparkline

Serve folder for web development

This is a very nifty use of a service worker—choose a local folder that you want to navigate using HTTP rather than the file system.

1990: Programming the World Wide Web – Web Development History

Ah, this brings back memories of hacking on the WorldWideWeb project at CERN!

(Not the original one. I’m not that old. I mean the recreation.)

Is Safari the new Internet Explorer?

The transcript from the latest episode of the HTTP 203 podcast is well worth perusing.

Internet Explorer halted development, no innovation. Would you say Safari is the new IE?

There was loads of stuff missing. Is Safari the new IE?

My early career was built on knowing the bugs in IE6 and how to solve them. Is Safari the new IE?

Internet Explorer 6, it had a really slow JavaScript engine, performance was bad in that browser. Is Safari the new IE?

Internet Explorer had a fairly cavalier attitude towards web standards. Is Safari the new IE?

Back in the day that we had almost no communication whatsoever. Is Safari the new IE?

Slow-release cycle. Is Safari the new IE?

HTTP/3 From A To Z: Core Concepts (Part 1) — Smashing Magazine

I spend most of my time in the application layers—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—so I fascinating to dive below the surface and learn about the upcoming HTTP/3. Sounds like it’s really more of a change to how things have always worked with the TCP protocol, still chugging away since it was created by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf.

Chromium Blog: Increasing HTTPS adoption

At some point, you won’t be able to visit the first web page ever published without first clicking through a full-page warning injected by your web browser:

Chrome will offer HTTPS-First Mode, which will attempt to upgrade all page loads to HTTPS and display a full-page warning before loading sites that don’t support it. Based on ecosystem feedback, we’ll explore making HTTPS-First mode the default for all users in the future.

Chromium Blog: A safer default for navigation: HTTPS

Just over a year ago, I pondered some default browser behaviours and how they might be updated.

The first one is happening: Chrome is going to assume https before checking for http.

Now what about the other default behaviour that’s almost 15 years old now? When might a viewport width value of device-width become the default?

The land before modern APIs – Increment: APIs

This is a wonderful tale of spelunking into standards from Darius Kazemi—I had no idea that HTTP status codes have their origin in a hastily made decision in the days of ARPANET.

20 people got together at MIT in 1972 for a weekend workshop. On the second day, a handful of people in a breakout session decided it would be a good idea to standardize error messages between two services for transferring data, even though those two services had not necessarily planned to speak to one another. One thing led to another, and now 404 is synonymous with “I can’t find the thing.”

This story is exactly the kind of layering of technologies that I was getting at in the first chapter of Resilient Web Design.

HTTP status codes are largely an accident of history. The people who came up with them didn’t plan on defining a numerical namespace that would last half a century or work its way into popular culture. You see this pattern over and over in the history of technology.

The Web Developer’s Guide to DNS | RJ Zaworski

At Codebar the other night, I was doing an intro chat with some beginners. At one point I touched on DNS. This explanation is great for detailing what’s going on under the hood.

Making Sense of Chrome Lite Pages - TimKadlec.com

Tim takes a closer look at this Google Lite thing.

Transcript of Tim Berners-Lee’s talk to the LCS 35th Anniversary celebrations, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1999/April/14

Twenty years ago—when the web was just a decade old—Tim Berners-Lee gave this talk, looking backwards and forwards.

For me the fundamental Web is the Web of people. It’s not the Web of machines talking to each other; it’s not the network of machines talking to each other. It’s not the Web of documents. Remember when machines talked to each other over some protocol, two machines are talking on behalf of two people.

So We Got Tracked Anyway

Even using a strict cookie policy won’t help when Facebook and Google are using TLS to fingerprint users. Time to get more paranoid:

HTTPS session identifiers can be disabled in Mozilla products manually by setting ‘security.ssl.disablesessionidentifiers’ in about:config.

On HTTPS and Hard Questions - TimKadlec.com

A great post by Tim following on from the post by Eric I linked to last week.

Is a secure site you can’t access better than an insecure one you can?

He rightly points out that security without performance is exlusionary.

…we’ve made a move to increase the security of the web by doing everything we can to get everything running over HTTPS. It’s undeniably a vital move to make. However this combination—poor performance but good security—now ends up making the web inaccessible to many.

Security. Performance. Accessibility. All three matter.

Securing Web Sites Made Them Less Accessible – Eric’s Archived Thoughts

This is a heartbreaking observation by Eric. He’s not anti-HTTPS by any stretch, but he is pointing out that caching servers become a thing of the past on a more secure web.

Can we do anything? For users of up-to-date browsers, yes: service workers create a “good” man in the middle that sidesteps the HTTPS problem, so far as I understand. So if you’re serving content over HTTPS, creating a service worker should be one of your top priorities right now, even if it’s just to do straightforward local caching and nothing fancier.

Seriously, though. What is a progressive web app? – Amberley Romo – Medium

What an excellent question! And what an excellent bit of sleuthing to get to the bottom of it. This is like linguistic spelunking on the World Wide Web.

Oh, and of course I love the little sidenote at the end.

BBC News on HTTPS – BBC Design + Engineering – Medium

BBC News has switched to HTTPS—hurrah!

Here, one of the engineers writes on Ev’s blog about the challenges involved. Personally, I think this is far more valuable and inspiring to read than the unempathetic posts claiming that switching to HTTPS is easy.

Update: Paul found the original URL for this …weird that they don’t link to it from the syndicated version.

A cartoon intro to DNS over HTTPS – Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog

This is a great illustrated explanation of how DNS resolution works.

Google and HTTP

I share many of these concerns.

The web is huge. Even bigger than Google. I love that the web preserves all the work. I don’t think anyone has the right to change the web so they no longer work.

We need more phishing sites on HTTPS!

All the books, Montag.

If we want a 100% encrypted web then we need to encrypt all sites, despite whether or not you agree with what they do/say/sell/etc… 100% is 100% and it includes the ‘bad guys’ too.

Secure Contexts Everywhere | Mozilla Security Blog

I’m all in favour of HTTPS everywhere, but this kind of strong-arming just feels like blackmail to me.

All new CSS properties won’t work without HTTPS‽ Come on!

I thought Mozilla was better than this.

Answers for young people - Tim Berners-Lee

Many, many years ago, Tim Berners-Lee wrote this page of answers to (genuinely) frequently asked questions he got from school kids working on reports. I absolutely love the clear straightforward language he uses to describe concepts like hypertext, packet switching, and HTTP.