A lovely description by Paul Ford of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
That simple handshake is the firmament upon which we have built trillion-dollar cathedrals and bazaars, the base upon which we construct other protocols and networks.
I like these design principles for server-side and client-side frameworks. I would say that they’re common sense but looking at many popular frameworks, this sense isn’t as common as it should be.
A really good introduction to front-end performance techniques. Most of this was already on my radar, but I still picked up a handy tip or two (particularly about DNS prefetching).
At this stage it should go without saying that you should be keeping up with this kind of thing: performance is really, really, really important.
A well-reasoned argument for tackling image optimisation on the server, using content-type negotiation.
Luke’s notes from my talk at An Event Apart in Chicago.
An in-depth analysis (graphs! data!) of how popular sites are using—or not using—compression.
View source.
Oh, this is very handy indeed: a quick lint tool for HTTP so you can see what kind of headers are being sent. There’s a bookmarklet in the footer too.
This is wonderful. A web server powered by people. Change the URL and a person will manually fetch the corresponding resource.
You can be part of the server team too.
A handy tool for checking page load times.
James follows up on his previous excellent post on hashbangs by diving into the situations where client-side routing is desirable. Watch this space for a follow-up post on performance.
This is wonderful stuff: a long-term project to track the performance of high-traffic sites over time: oodles of lovely data and some quite shocking stats.
Anil Dash writes about the realtime web, calling it Pushbutton.
A classic essay from Clay Shirky on the dumb nature of the web.
Eleven years old and more relevant than ever.
Friendlier HTTP errors.
This is a good straightforward hands-on explanation of Ajax: succinct and clear.
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.
My fellow Brightonian geek, Dom, has written an article about using Perl and Ajax.
"...it must degrade well. It must still be accessible. It must be usable. If not, it is a cool useless piece of rubbish for some or many people."
Who knew? The way I do my Ajax is a microformat. AHAH: Asynchronous HTML and HTTP.
Ajax in The Guardian.
A nice introduction the XMLHttpRequest object by Cameron Adams.
Documentation for the new Google Maps API. Unlike most web services, this one is run entirely over JavaScript.
This is the plain vanilla look.
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