"The land before modern APIs" by Darius Kazemi
(@darius)
Nice history of HTTP status codes.
"""
The numeric codes are assigned by groups [to] hopefully cover other protocols besides RJE (like FTP).
"""
This is from RFC 360, about a Remote Job Entry protocol (RJE), submitted in 1972. You know you're in deep, when reading a three-digit IETF RFC!
"Why we are not adding AVIF support (yet)" by Dejan Pelzel.
The founder of BunnyCDN shares their technical analysis and what needs improving first.
Nutshell:
- Terrible server encoding perf, unsuitable for on-demand, even with disproportionate resources. (Better algos?)
- Slow to decode/render. (Better algo, hardware support?)
- No progressive render, not even basic linear. (All or nothing.)
Bandwidth isn't everything :)
#webperf #webp #av1 #avif #bunnycdn
https://bunnycdn.com/blog/lets-talk-avif-and-why-we-are-not-adding-support-just-yet/
"Profiling live Wikipedia traffic with near-zero overhead"
> Each day of Wikipedia backend traffic yields about 3 million stack trace samples, as collected by Excimer, a new a low-overhead sampling profiler for PHP.
I wrote all about it in this year's Performance Calendar:
👉 https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2020/profiling-php-in-production-at-scale/
Why does the substring() method in JavaScript do magic “argument swapping”?
It's existed since the original JavaScript 1.0 from Netscape (as rev-engineered by Microsoft). Netscape 4 briefly removed the behaviour with JavaScript 1.2 in June 1997.
But... that same month the misfeature completed standardisation as part of ECMAScript 1.
Thus, it returned with the release of Netscape 4.5 in 1998, and been with us ever since!
Banned C functions from Git code base, the commits are interesting https://github.com/git/git/commits/master/banned.h
"Blogging vs. blog setups" by @rakhim
Yup, this hits close to home. Very much of this moment. 😅
#wordpress #ssg #webcomic #webcomics #comics #programminghumor
📣 New year, new blog post: I fell into the rabbit hole that is monochrome image dithering. I wrote down everything I learned! 👨🎓
(… and wrote a small demo that dithers an image with all these different dithering algorithms.)
An Exploration of JSON Interoperability Vulnerabilities
https://labs.bishopfox.com/tech-blog/an-exploration-of-json-interoperability-vulnerabilities
The same JSON document can be parsed with different values across microservices, leading to a variety of potential security risks. If you prefer a hands-on approach, try the labs and when they scare you, come back and read on.
Classic splash screens from Adobe Illustrator and Mac OS.
Which version was your first love (or hate) with?
For me, it's Adobe 5.5, on System 7.5, using my dad's Macintosh Performa. Brings back memories!
https://www.ucreative.com/inspiration/you-be-inspired-splash-screens/
https://www.ucreative.com/inspiration/you-be-inspired-splash-screens/
#design #nostalgia #adobe #illustrator #webdesign #nostalgie #apple #macintosh #macos #osx #mastoart
The Devil's Albatros - An algorithmic layout technique:
https://9elements.com/blog/the-devils-albatros-an-algorithmic-layout-technique/
"Build[...] whole websites without using any media-query[...]."
#WebDev #WebDevelopment #UI #Layout #CSS #CSSLayout #AlgorithmicLayout
Citibank is, in fact, not entitled to getting back the $500 million it accidentally paid back too early to creditors. The transaction was carried out by subcontractors and signed off by three layers of approvals, none of which understood what they were looking at.
Great reminder that tech debt, diffusion of responsibility. and outsourcing work... oft only appear cheaper because the real cost gets externalised. Think it won't happen again?
New blog post: "JavaScript performance beyond bundle size" https://nolanlawson.com/2021/02/23/javascript-performance-beyond-bundle-size/
This is kind of a grab-bag post about all the different performance metrics I think about when writing or using JavaScript modules. I hope folks find it interesting!
The US news featured a subtle reference to Hackers (1995 film) today. 😎
We're all one of today's lucky "Ten Thousand" at some point, and likely will be many more times in the future.
Each of us take turns filling up on things that "most" people seem to know, for I have yet to meet one who knows all those "most people" things! (non-overlapping subsets etc etc).
Be kind to today's lucky Ten Thousand! ♥️
(H/T @celia)
"Why Generation X will save the web" by Heather Burns https://webdevlaw.uk/2021/01/30/why-generation-x-will-save-the-web/
This is something that gnaws away at me. Gen Xers and older Millennials (like myself) are nostalgic for the old, untamed, pre-centralized internet. The younger generation has no memory of this. What are *they* fighting for? (Hint: it's not necessarily the same thing. Gen Z probably doesn't care much about the hazy memories of us "boomers," and by "boomers" I mean anyone over 30.)
The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
I've told this story at conferences - but due to the general situation I thought I'd retell it here.
A few years ago I was doing policy research in a housing benefits office in London. They are singularly unlovely places. The walls are brightened up with posters offering helpful services for people fleeing domestic violen
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/
#/etc/ #html5 #web #weeknotes #work
I came across a rather peculiar implementation of a string repeat function for JavaScript.
There's a built-in for this since ES2015, and prior to that, the following was a common idom:
> str = "x"
> count = 3
> out = (new Array(count + 1).join(str)
But, an MDN contributor thought - we can optimize this! Can you figure out how and why it works?
Wikipedia.org and sister projects, by operating system after December 2020:
* 30.4%: Android
* 27.0%: Windows
* 25.6%: iOS
* (8.7%: Other)
* 7.0%: macOS
* 0.8%: Linux (incl. Ubuntu)
* 0.5%: Chrome OS
references for browserstats, open data
Explore the data visually:
* Browser stats: https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/
* Page view query on stats.wikimedia.org: https://w.wiki/v6K
Access the raw data:
* https://analytics.wikimedia.org/published/datasets/periodic/reports/metrics/browser/
* https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/AQS/Pageviews
Wikipedia.org and sister projects, stats for December 2020:
* 49%: Chrome, Chrome Mobile
* 26%: Safari, Mobile Safari
* 4.9%: Firefox, Firefox Mobile
* 2.7%: Samsung Internet
* 2.3%: Edge
* 2.0%: Chrome Mobile iOS
* 1.9%: Google app
* 0.91%: Internet Explorer
* 0.76%: Opera
100% = 16.4 billion page views (desktop+mobile web, no apps, no bots)
"Wikipedia is twenty, it’s time to start covering it better"
from CJR.
In a nut shell: We need good solid journalism, a lot of it!
Journalists and Wikipedia editors can and do strengthen each other. But, for day-to-day topics and news, I feel we're nowdays seeing too much journalism rely solely on Wikipedia and other tertiary sources, and too little little paid journalism to then serve as sources for Wikipedia itself.
#wikipedia20 #research #journalist #journalism
https://www.cjr.org/opinion/wikipedia-is-twenty-its-time-to-start-covering-it-better.php
How I hijacked the top-level domain of a sovereign state
https://labs.detectify.com/2021/01/15/how-i-hijacked-the-top-level-domain-of-a-sovereign-state/
He registered an expired domain used by the .cd ccTLD. Great report.
"Stealing Private YouTube Videos, One Frame at a Time"
by David Schütz
Neatly found bug, and great showcase of how a pen tester goes to work on a complex system.
#infosec #youtubedl #pentest #pentesting
https://bugs.xdavidhu.me/google/2021/01/11/stealing-your-private-videos-one-frame-at-a-time/
"The land before modern APIs" by Darius Kazemi
(@darius)
Nice history of HTTP status codes.
"""
The numeric codes are assigned by groups [to] hopefully cover other protocols besides RJE (like FTP).
"""
This is from RFC 360, about a Remote Job Entry protocol (RJE), submitted in 1972. You know you're in deep, when reading a three-digit IETF RFC!
Dutch geek in London ♥️ free open-source software.
Principal software engineer at Wikimedia Foundation, QUnit lead maintainer. Interested in: Wikipedia, web performance, web standards, user-interface design, digital privacy and security. He/him.
Linguistics alt: @krinkle at polyglot.city.