How come all the talk about IPv6 comes with illustrations like 2001:db8:1234:abcd::321? When we eventually adopt IPv6, is some person or company going to find all the students, hackers and IT novices hitting the same network addresses just because they were mentioned in the IPv6 text books and cheat sheets? Will the eventual owners of these addresses be like current SlashDot victims, overloaded with unexpected traffic?
No. In fact, you are encouraged to use the 2001:db8 block of IPv6 addresses in your documentation (and possibly some illustrative code) precisely because it is reserved for that purpose. RFC 3849 explains that “the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) allocated a unicast address prefix for documentation purposes”, so we can safely use [click title to read more…]
I was disappointed to discover from the public minutes a few days ago, that the W3C BPWG had to give up the quest to establish standards for Content Transformation Proxies. It would seem that they just didn’t get enough implementations to conclude that the specification was ready for prime-time, and it’s now going to be consigned to Note status. After all the work that they put into this effort, this really is an ignominious end. I’m sure the casual observer will be debating the possible causes for this, including perhaps:
The providers of CT solutions can’t/won’t comply.
The CT providers have moved on to other things and don’t care about the CTG.
CT proxies are becoming less relevant as [click title to read more…]
If history teaches us anything, it’s this: we’ve seen it all before, we’ll see it all again. I’ve been pondering the “app vs Web” tug o’ war for quite some time, and since my early days with computers (some 30 years ago, as I write this) there have been constant cycles of centralisation and decentralisation.
Short history lesson
It started long before I got involved. This is one case where we know whether it was chicken or egg. In the absence of anything like a working network, computing solutions were centralised. As late as the 1970s, computers were designed for just one task each (a single app on a single computer). You might look at this as “on-device applications”. Computers [click title to read more…]
XHTML 2.0 didn’t quite make it to the finish line, so we’re left with the 1.x versions. W3C will be fixing up the outstanding issues in 1.1 to the end of the year, then retiring the group. So XHTML 2.0 won’t happen as a final W3C Recommendation. However, with so many years of work already poured into it, don’t be surprised if the momentum keeps things going with XHTML continuing outside W3CÂ to asymtotically approach 2.0.
Zaragoza was the host city for MWeb’07 and I was very happy to appear as an invited speaker, to summarise the current activity in standardisation of mobile-related Web technology. Unfortunately, I don’t speak a word of Spanish. (OK, so cerveza is in my lexicon.) Thankfully, the audience had an excellent grasp of English. You can read a summary of the event as recalled by Alan Chuter.
I also had the benefit, at various times, of having someone sit beside me to translate. Many thanks guys!