Link tags: status

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.

Battery Status readout as a privacy risk

The security research that went into improving the spec for the Battery Status API. This is why it’s so important that the web holds itself to high standard.

Even most unlikely mechanisms bring unexpected consequences from privacy point of views. That’s why it is necessary to analyze new features, standards, designs, architectures - and products with a privacy angle. This careful process will yield results, decrease the number of issues, abuses and unwelcome surprizes.

We know what you’re doing… A social networking privacy experiment by Callum Haywood

A grab-bag of public updates on Facebook.

Austenbook

Pride and Prejudice told through Facebook.

An Interesting Way of Showing Battery Status

The screen of this mobile phone looks like a glass of water. The amount of water shows the battery life. The phone has a built in motion sensor to keep the water level.

AJAX Activity Indicators

Want to indicate that something is happening on a web page, like... oh, I don't know... an Ajax request or something? Here's a cornucopia of animated progress indicators.