Mark Nottingham

A while back, I refactored REDbot to separate out a HTTP message linting library. httplint checks about 325 aspects of HTTP messages, covering the syntax and semantics of almost 200 HTTP header fields. Then, I got curious: what happens when you point it at Common Crawl? Its availability on AWS brings the opportunity to do a large-scale survey of how HTTP is used and abused. With the help of Claude Code, the result is cc-lint. Pointed at over 120 million responses from nearly 50,000 sites, the…

As one of the authors of the Well-Known URI specification and current Designated Expert for the registry, I field a lot of questions about how they should be used, and end up coaching a lot of folks on how to best use them. Below, I’ve summarised how I think about them. Note that these aren’t all requirements for registration – just what I consider good practice. What Well-Known URIs are Good For Well-known URIs work best when the client – whether it’s a browser, bot, or other software – knows…

A couple of weeks ago, I made a straw-man proposal for a new Web feed autodiscovery mechanism. I got some encouragement and some pushback (usual for this sort of thing). One of the issues raised was regarding internationalisation – a few people said that I should support multiple languages in the format, rather than relying on HTTP content negotiation. I felt my approach was adequate, given the specifics of the use case. However, it bugged me: I didn’t have data to back me up – AFAICT there’s…

For much of the history of computing, it was reasonably safe to assume that a machine was doing what you told it to do (and what its creators promised it would do), because its operations were local. You bought a laptop or desktop with an operating system, and it did what it said on the tin: it ran programs and stored files. You bought a spreadsheet and a word processor, and those programs performed those tasks and didn’t do anything else. Software that didn’t do this was in a separate bucket…

For much of the history of computing, it was reasonably safe to assume that a machine was doing what you told it to do (and what its creators promised it would do), because its operations were local. You bought a laptop or desktop with an operating system, and it did what it said on the tin: it ran programs and stored files. You bought a spreadsheet and a word processor, and those programs performed those tasks and didn’t do anything else. Software that didn’t do this was in a separate bucket…

Standards work is notoriously hard to track. Let’s explore if grounding AI in working group records can make that history more accessible.

Openness makes the Internet harder to govern — but also makes it resilient, innovative, and difficult to capture. Let's look at how the openness of the Internet both defines it and ensures its success.