Tag: standards

International Electrotechnical Commission : World Plugs

International Electrotechnical Commission has a very handy (especially before travelling to a foreign country) list of different plugs (a total of 14 at the time of this writing), mapped to countries of the world.  So if you don’t have one of these:

adaptor

make sure you check the list of adapters & converters worth buying before you fly out.  And while on the topic of this great variety, IEC also explains why there are so many and if this annoyance will ever be sold:

The IEC issued its International Standard for a universal plug in the 1970s; so far it has been adopted by Brazil and South Africa. It is unlikely that there will be a run on the standard in the near future. Literally hundreds of millions of plugs and sockets have been installed and who would convince a country to invest now in changing its whole infrastructure?

Most likely the future will lie with solutions such as the USB plug or possibly a multi-plug that can accommodate many different plugs, or even new technologies such as LVDC (low voltage direct current) or wireless charging mechanisms.

HTTP/1.1 just got a major update

HTTP/1.1 just got a major update – somehow I missed this last month.

The IETF just published several new RFCs that update HTTP/1.1:

These documents make the original specification for HTTP/1.1 obsolete. As a HTTP geek, this is a big deal.

RFC 2616, which was written more than 15 years ago, was the specification everybody has implemented, and I suspect many of you occassionally have used as a reference.

Json Résumé – a community driven open source initiative to create a JSON based standard for résumés

Json Résumé – a community driven open source initiative to create a JSON based standard for résumés.

It’d be awesome to see LinkedIn integration with this.

Is INPUT tag valid when used outside of a FORM tag?

Here is an update from the “learn something new every day” department – using <input> tag outside of (or, in other words, without) <form> tag is perfectly valid.  It’s valid in the newest HTML5 spec, and it was valid with earlier versions of HTML and XHTML too.

Interesting, that today was the first time I came across this, after doing HTML for almost 20 years.

http2 explained

http2 explained – This document describes http2 at a technical and protocol level. Background, the protocol, the implementations and the future.

Some highlights:

  • The http2 spec is expected to ship in June 2014 (a month or two away!)
  • http2 is heavily based on Google’s SPDY
  • http2 is binary
  • http2 fixes a lot of issues with HTTP 1.1 (pipelining, head of line blocking, etc)
  • http2 brings new features (server push, block, reset)
  • http2 will keep the URL schemes (http and https)
  • http2 will mostly be implemented for https (via protocol negotiations in TLS)
  • http2 already has a variety of implementations: Firefox and Google Chrome (MSIE coming), cURL, Goolge, Twitter, Facebook.  Apache and Nginx expected.