Ryan Tomayko

Common HTTP Implementation Problems, W3C Note —

Interesting W3C Note from January 2003 that I don’t remember ever seeing:

HTTP and URIs are the basis of the World Wide Web, yet they are often misunderstood, and their implementations and uses are sometimes incomplete or incorrect. This document tries to improve this situation by providing a set of good practices to improve implementations of HTTP and related standards (Web servers, server-side Web engines), as well as their use.

The information here is relevant to people who build web apps, not HTTP server implementors — the title is a bit misleading (not actually but practically). I especially like this bit about why short, less meaningful URLs are better than verbose, descriptive URLs. Shortness has become the most important characteristic of URL design in most apps I’ve built recently; SEO be damned.

Martian Mindsets —

Sam Ruby filling in for Mark Pilgrim (and featuring Mark Pilgrim in the comments) skewers Joel Spolsky over his “Martian Headsets” piece on the IE8 standards-mode dilemma. I use the word “skewered” in the nicest way possible, of course.

W3C's Excessive DTD Traffic —

“Our hope was that the authors of misbehaving software and the administrators of sites who deployed it would notice these errors and make the necessary fixes to the software responsible.” – You must be new here.

A pool for the W3C validators —

This is a good idea. The w3c hosted validators tend to perform on the bad side of horrible. I’ve run the validator locally but never thought to look for mirrors.

The Rule of Least Power - W3C TAG Finding 23 February 2006 —

“There is an important tradeoff between the computational power of a language and the ability to determine what a program in that language is doing.”

CSS 3: A Giant Serving Of FAIL —

“… CSS 3 is a joke. A sad, sick joke being perpetrated by people who clearly don’t build actual web apps…”

public-html@w3.org Mail Archives —

Looks like things are starting to heat up over here.

W3C Markup Validator Results for "You, me and the W3C (aka Reinventing HTML)" —

Chairing the WG is one way to fix your validation issues! (yes, I’m just being mean now — ignore me. no but seriously.)