Simon Willison’s Weblog

RFC 7807: Problem Details for HTTP APIs (via) This RFC has been brewing for quite a while, and is currently in last call (ends 2022-11-03). I’m designing the JSON error messages for Datasette at the moment so this could not be more relevant for me.

# 1st November 2022, 3:15 am / errors, http, json, mark-nottingham, rfc, standards

How to Read an RFC. An extremely useful guide to reading RFCs by Mark Nottingham. I didn’t know most of the stuff in here.

# 6th August 2018, 10:38 pm / mark-nottingham, rfc

On HTTP Load Testing. Mark Nottingham explains that running good HTTP benchmarks means understanding available network bandwidth, using dedicated physical hardware, testing at progressively higher loads and a whole lot more.

# 18th May 2011, 10:17 am / http, mark-nottingham, recovered, load-testing

HTTP + Politics = ? Mark Nottingham ponders the technical implications of Australia’s decision to apply a filter to all internet traffic. Australia is large enough (and far enough away from the northern hemisphere) that the speed of light is a performance issue, but filtering technologies play extremely poorly with optimisation technologies such as HTTP pipelining and Google’s SPDY proposal.

# 15th December 2009, 3:36 pm / australia, filtering, google, http, mark-nottingham, performance, pipelining, politics, spdy

Traffic Server. Mark Nottingham explains the release of Traffic Server, a new Apache Incubator open source project donated by Yahoo! using code originally developed at Inktomi around a decade ago. Traffic Server is a HTTP proxy/cache, similar to Squid and Varnish (though Traffic Server acts as both a forward and reverse proxy, whereas Varnish only handles reverse).

# 1st November 2009, 12:15 pm / apache, cache, http, inktomi, mark-nottingham, open-source, proxy, squid, trafficserver, varnish, yahoo

The Resource Expert Droid. Like the HTML Validator but for your server’s HTTP headers—extremely useful.

# 25th June 2009, 10:06 am / headers, http, mark-nottingham, resourceexpertdroid, validator

Counting the ways that rev=“canonical” hurts the Web. Mark Nottingham complains about misapplied trust (a page can falsely claim to be the canonical URL for another page), the easy confusion between rev and rel and the lack of discussion with relevant communities.

# 14th April 2009, 2:11 pm / mark-nottingham, revcanonical, standards, urls

OAuth in Minneapolis. OAuth looks like it’s on track for an IETF Working Group.

# 20th November 2008, 6:55 pm / ietf, mark-nottingham, oauth, standards

HTTP Cache Channels (via) Interesting extension to the HTTP caching model by Mark Nottingham: caches can be told to subscribe to an Atom feed which alerts them to cached data that has gone stale. Group invalidation is also supported.

# 4th January 2008, 12:48 pm / atom, cachechannels, caching, http, mark-nottingham, squid

Two HTTP Caching Extensions. stale-while-revalidate serves cached content even while a refresh has been triggered and is currently being pulled in to the cache; stale-if-error serves cached content if a service has gone down.

# 12th December 2007, 11:23 am / caching, http, mark-nottingham, squid

ETags, ETags, ETags. They’re no magic bullet.

# 7th August 2007, 2:51 pm / etags, http, mark-nottingham

The State of Proxy Caching. If you’ve always wondered exactly what intermediate proxies are going to do to your carefully constructed Web application, here’s your answer.

# 21st June 2007, 2:18 pm / caching, http, mark-nottingham, proxies

mnot: Vendor-pires (via) WS-* vendors and vampires.

# 11th May 2006, 3:45 pm / mark-nottingham

Ubiquitious Fragment Identifiers. mnot reveals his ID anchors using CSS generated content.

# 30th May 2004, 9:06 am / mark-nottingham