This story of the Network Time Protocol hammers home the importance of infrastructure and its maintenance:
Technology companies worth billions rely on open-source code, including N.T.P., and the maintenance of that code is often handled by a small group of individuals toiling away without pay.
During the workshop, several online publishers indicated that if it weren’t for the privileged position in the Google Search carousel given to AMP content, they would not publish in that format.
RFC 8890 maybe the closest thing we’ve got to a Hippocratic oath right now.
A community that agrees to principles that are informed by shared values can use them to navigate hard decisions.
Many discussions influenced this document, both inside and outside of the IETF and IAB. In particular, Edward Snowden’s comments regarding the priority of end users at IETF 93 and the HTML5 Priority of Constituencies were both influential.
April 7th, 2019 is going to be the 50 year anniversary of the first ever Request for Comments, known as an RFC.
Darius Kazemi is going to spend the year writing commentary on the first 365 Request For Comments from the Internt Engineering Task Force:
In honor of this anniversary, I figured I would read one RFC each day of 2019, starting with RFC 1 and ending with RFC 365. I’ll offer brief commentary on each RFC.
How the IETF redefined the process of creating standards.
To some visionary pioneers, such as Ted Nelson, who had been developing a purist hypertext paradigm called Xanadu for decades, the browser represented an undesirably messy direction for the evolution of the Internet. To pragmatists, the browser represented important software evolving as it should: in a pluralistic way, embodying many contending ideas, through what the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) calls “rough consensus and running code.”
RFC 527
Markdown gets its own media type: text/markdown.
After I wrote about digital preservation and the need to save everything, not just the so-called “important” stuff, Jason wrote a lovely piece with his own thoughts on the matter:
In order to write a history, you need evidence of what happened. When we talk about preserving the stuff we make on the web, it isn’t because we think a Facebook status update, or those GeoCities sites have such significance now. It’s because we can’t know.
In a timely coincidence, Vint Cerf also spoke about the importance of digital preservation:
When you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives that is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, people’s tweets, and all of the world wide web, it’s clear that we stand to lose an awful lot of our history.
He warns of the dangers of rapidly-obsoleting file formats:
We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realising it. We digitise things because we think we will preserve them, but what we don’t understand is that unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse, than the artefacts that we digitised.
It was a little weird that the Guardian headline refers to Vint Cerf as “Google boss”. On the BBC he’s labelled as “Google’s Vint Cerf”. Considering he’s one of the creators of the internet itself, it’s a bit like referring to Neil Armstrong as a NASA employee.
I have to say, I just love listening to him talk. He’s so smooth. I’m sure that the character of The Architect from The Matrix Reloaded is modelled on him.
Vint Cerf knows a thing or two about long-term thinking when it comes to data formats. He has written many RFCs for the IETF (my favourite being RFC 2468). Back in 1969, he wrote RFC 20, proposing the ASCII format for network interchange. If you’ve ever used the keypress event in JavaScript and wondered why, for example, the number 13 corresponds to a carriage return, this is where all those numbers come from.
Last month, over 45 years after the RFC’s original publication, it became an official standard.
So when Vint Cerf warns about the dangers of digitising into file formats that could become unreadable, I think we should pay attention to him.
This RFC for ASCII (by Vint Cerf) is over 45 years old.
Last month it became a standard.
There are some good points here comparing HTTP2 and SPDY, but I’m mostly linking to this because of the three wonderful opening paragraphs:
A very long time ago —in 1989 —Ronald Reagan was president, albeit only for the final 19½ days of his term. And before 1989 was over Taylor Swift had been born, and Andrei Sakharov and Samuel Beckett had died.
In the long run, the most memorable event of 1989 will probably be that Tim Berners-Lee hacked up the HTTP protocol and named the result the “World Wide Web.” (One remarkable property of this name is that the abbreviation “WWW” has twice as many syllables and takes longer to pronounce.)
Tim’s HTTP protocol ran on 10Mbit/s, Ethernet, and coax cables, and his computer was a NeXT Cube with a 25-MHz clock frequency. Twenty-six years later, my laptop CPU is a hundred times faster and has a thousand times as much RAM as Tim’s machine had, but the HTTP protocol is still the same.
Tantek shares a fascinating history lesson from Tim Berners-Lee on how the IETF had him change his original nomenclature of UDI—Universal Document Identifier—to what we now use today: URL—Uniform Resource Locator.
The IETF have decided that network surveillance is damage to be routed around.
A history lesson from Vint Cerf. I can’t help but picture him as The Architect in The Matrix Reloaded.
When Tim Berners-Lee invented and released the World Wide Web (WWW) design in late 1991, he found an open and receptive internet in operation onto which the WWW could be placed. The WWW design, like the design of the internet, was very open and encouraged a growing cadre of self-taught webmasters to develop content and applications.
I love Tim Bray’s idea for naming the response code for censored content on the internet in honour of Ray Bradbury.