I am still in the process of converting my website-maintaining scripts to work on Debian GNU/Linux rather than Mac OS X. Last episode left me with a conundrum as how to convert SVG files to PNG for the sake of browsers that cannot display SVG properly. Read more
Web servers started as a solution to getting information from other sites. Then it became convenient to use HTML and HTTP on one's local-area network, and for some reason we had to call that idea an 'intranet' to make people pay attention. Sometimes it is useful to run a mini-server on the same computer as your desktop application; in this note I'll discuss this idea in the context of an application written to Microsoft's .Net platform, since that's what we use at work. Read more
A couple of weekends ago I decided to take up one of the Work Items for CouchDb: write a client for the server that runs as JavaScript in the user’s browser, Ajax-style. As someone whose day job is writing web sites using Microsoft ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server, writing an application in plain JavaScript+HTML comes as a refreshing change. Read more
There is some controversy over the proposal by the Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 team to support a new header X-UA-Compatible in IE8. Leaving aside the argument as to whether this header should exist at all, there is the question of whether anyone at Microsoft has read RFC 2616 (the HTTP 1.1 specification) and spent as much as five minutes considering how to make their header fit in to the established conventions.
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For no reason at all I want to describe a RESTful protocol based on HTTP + JSON for a made-up scenario. Read more