The Cafes » 2006 » October

Over long distances, airplanes are the fastest way to travel (at least until we invent teleportation) but over short distances that isn’t true. If you want to get from La Guardia Airport to O’Hare, take a plane; but if you want to go from La Guardia to JFK, take a cab. Over shorter distances still, a bicycle may beat a car; and over the shortest distances, the fastest way to get somewhere is usually walking. Terry Pratchett explained it well in Interesting Times:

Of the three things that most people know about the horse, the third is that over a short distance, it can’t run as fast as a man. As Rincewind had learned to his advantage, it has more legs to sort out.

You naturally choose your mode of transport according to the distance you plan to travel. A few hundred meters or less, walk. A kilometer or two, take a horse (or more likely these days, a bicycle). 10K to a few hundred kilometers, take a car. And beyond a few hundred kilometers, airplane is the fastest choice; and the longer the journey the better a choice it becomes.

Programming is much the same. (more…)

The W3C is finally waking up and realizing they’ve got a problem with HTML. The browser vendors are once again abandoning them and going their own way (except for Microsoft, which is going in a different direction entirely). The W3C has wisely decided to start listening to Mozilla, Opera, and Apple and revisit classic HTML. Unfortunately though they realize they have a problem, they haven’t yet realized what the problem is. Berners-Lee seems to think it’s about “quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces”, and it’s not.

XHTML is not the problem. Well-formedness is certainly not the problem. Hell, even namespaces aren’t really the problem although they’re clunky and ugly and everyone hates them. The problem is that the W3C has abandoned HTML for years. HTML hasn’t moved forward since 1999. No wonder browser vendors are getting antsy.
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The POST method is vastly overused in HTML forms, with negative consequences for the user experience. POST requests cannot be bookmarked, linked to, indexed, searched, or cached. For example, recently I wanted to link to a list of top independent albums from RIAA Radar. However I couldn’t becuase the search request was sent via POST. The URL was http://www.riaaradar.com/search.asp, but there was nothing in the URL to indicate whether I was searching for Black Box Recorder or Britney Spears.

All safe requests should be done with GET. GET is vastly friendlier to users and dramatically improves your search engine placement. (In fact, form results sent with POST might as well be invisible to search engines.) POST should only be used for requests that cause some action to be taken: a book to be ordered, a page to be printed, a contract to be signed, etc. Search results and many other things don’t fall into this category.
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Representational State Transfer (REST) is the explicit architecture of HTTP and the World Wide Web. It is a well-designed, well thought out system that enables scalable applications that service millions of users. It is also a simpler system that enables developers who understand it to bring applications to market faster that perform better. Well, actually, no, it’s not. And therein lies a story.
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Everyone’s so excited about Web 2.0 and AJAX. OK, Google maps is cool; but personally I’m still finding lots of exciting things that can be done solely within the space of classic HTML and basic forms. Most of the interesting services are those that don’t depend on fancy UIs, but instead find new and interesting ways to present information or services. For example,
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