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.
Read the rest of this entry »
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,
Read the rest of this entry »
When you follow a link from one page or site to another, the browser usually sends a Referer [sic] header to the server to tell sites where you came from:
GET /test.phtml HTTP/1.1 Host: cafe.elharo.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051130 Firefox/1.5 Referer: http://blog.elharo.com/blog/ Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 300 Connection: keep-alive
In general this is a good thing. However, unscrupulous sites can and do abuse this information to violate visitors’ privacy and track them across the Web. In combination with cookies, it’s especially dangerous. In Firefox, you can disable the sending of the Referer header completely, and in general I recommend you do so. Here are the steps:
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been writing my talk notes in XML and delivering them in HTML for years. These days I rarely if ever use PowerPoint. Especially since my talks tend to be quite code heavy, HTML works much better. It’s much easier to put a decent amount of (still legible) source code on an HTML page than a PowerPoint slide, plus I can scroll if I need to.
One of the most common questions I get when I give one of these talks is how I make the slide advance from one to the next by just hitting one key. It’s actually not that hard, but it does surprise people, so I thought I’d show you.
Read the rest of this entry »
Companies are really fond of collecting information from you they don’t really need before letting you read their website, check out demos, and download free-as-in-beer software. Occasionally they ask for this for free-as-in-speech software. One technique they use to make sure you give them your information is to e-mail you your username or password or license key. That way, even if the user is named “Barney Rubble” they’ve got a pretty good idea of your real e-mail address.
Certainly you good set up a free account on HotMail or GMail, and use that to register. However that takes time and effort. If you use the account more than once, they can cross-correlate your registrations on different sites. There is, however, a better solution: Mailinator.
Read the rest of this entry »
