I've gotten sufficiently annoyed with a trivial problem that I'm preparing to write an IETF RFC. Yeah. That's how ticked off I am! Every site that I sign up for asks me to upload an avatar to represent myself. Whenever I change my photo, I have to log in to a hundred sites and change it there. Perhaps they could all use Gravatar - but that's a centralised service and doesn't work with wildcard…
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Let's say that you've visited a website and want to share it with your friends. At the bottom of the article is a list of popular sharing destinations - Facebook, BlueSky, LinkedIn, Telegram, Reddit, HackerNews etc. You click the relevant icon and get taken to the site with the sharing details pre-filled. The problem is, every different site has a different intent for sharing links and…
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There's a new Web Standard in town! Meet WebMonetization - it aims to be a low effort way to help users passively pay website owners. The pitch is simple. A website owner places a single new line in their HTML's <head> - something like this: <link rel="monetization" href="https://wallet.example.com/edent" /> That address is a "Payment Pointer". As a user browses the web, their browser takes …
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If you use Multi-Factor Authentication, you'll be well used to scanning in QR codes which allow you to share a secret code with a website. These are known as Time-based One Time Passwords (TOTP). As I've moaned about before, TOTP has never been properly standardised. It's a mish-mash of half-finished proposals with no active development, no test suite, and no-one looking after it. Which is…
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Imagine, just for a moment, you and your friends decide to travel in time. In order to make sure you can authenticate your communications with each other, you set up a shared Time-based One Time Password (TOTP). The TOTP algorithm uses a Hash-based Message Authentication Code (HMAC). The hash is calculated from a shared key and a time-based component. The key is a short string of characters.…
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Hot on the heels of a post I wrote 4 years ago, wouldn't it be useful to have a well-known URl for user avatar images? When I sign up to a web service, I don't want to faff around uploading an image to use as my avatar. I want that service to look at my email address or social-sign-in and automatically pick up my preferred graphic. Here's how I see it working. A user signs in to a service…
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Facebook Meta - like many other tech titans - has institutional Shiny Object Syndrome. It goes something like this: Launch a product to great fanfare Spend a few years hyping it as ✨the future✨ Stop answering emails and pull requests If you're lucky, announce that the product is abandoned but, more likely, just forget about it. Open Graph Protocol (OGP) is one of those products. The val…
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I recently read Future Law - a book of essays about using popular culture to explain technological and legal concepts. One essay looks looks at GDPR issues experienced by Disney® Princesses. I thought I'd try my hand at something similar! So here's my (brief and incomplete) guide to Technical Standards in Star Wars! Where do we see compatibility - and incompatibility - within the Star Wars …
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As per the AMP AC charter, I have resigned with immediate effect. As I was a non-corporate representative, I will not be nominating a replacement. I have loved working with the AC. They are a team of brilliant individuals who are all committed to trying to make AMP better, and I'm sorry to leave them. I've been a member of the AC for a little over two years and now is the time to step away and…
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Recently, I bought an eBook which has a bug. I'd like to explain what the bug is, why it is a problem, and how I'm trying to get it corrected. Amazon sells eBooks in KF8 format. That is an ePub with some proprietary extras. ePub is a standard based off HTML5. You can read the ePub 3 specification but, basically, it is a .zip of HTML files. If you unzip an eBook, you can read the source code…
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Noodling thoughts. The humble <img> element is one of the oldest parts of HTML. It allows you to put a static image in a document. Later revisions allowed for animated images - like GIFs. And the <map> element made parts of the image clickable. But what about interactive images? Like panoramas and photospeheres? Here's a 360° image. You can drag it to see all around. That uses the …
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Hello! It looks like you're writing a blog post - would you like help with that? chuckles Me and my colleagues at Microsoft have decided that the world needs more Clippy - the adorable animated paperclip. To help with that, we're bringing a new feature to Edge 6.0. Web Developers can now use <clippy> to call up an animated virtual assistant. I've spoken to several people in Microsoft, and we …
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