Link archive: January 7th, 2015

HTTP/2.0 - The IETF is Phoning It In - ACM Queue

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.

We Suck at HTTP

I’m always surprised to find that working web developers often don’t know (or care) about basic protocol-level stuff like when to use GET and when to use POST.

My point is that a lot of web developers today are completely ignorant of the protocol that is the basis for their job. A core understanding of HTTP should be a base requirement for working in this business.

Apps Everywhere, but No Unifying Link - NYTimes.com

But as people spend more time on their mobile devices and in their apps, their Internet has taken a step backward, becoming more isolated, more disorganized and ultimately harder to use — more like the web before search engines.

Postcards from a Supply Chain

Dan has started writing up what he did on his Summer hols …on a container ship travelling to China.

It is, of course, in the form of an email newsletter because that’s what all the cool kids are doing these days.

A New Way to Test Internet Explorer on OS X, iOS and Android | Rey Bango

This a great step-by-step walkthrough from Rey on setting up a remote version of Internet Explorer for testing on Mac.