Billie Hilton billiegoose

Embedding data in HTTP messages - an exhaustive analysis

Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) is the de facto protocol for sending data over the Internet. Today in addition to transporting hypertext documents, it is used to transport images, stylesheets, JavaScript, fonts - nearly everything in a web page. Rarely do developers pause to question why this is. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about HTTP and its relation to APIs and web apps. This document contains my thoughts on the usefulness of HTTP requests as envelopes for sending data.

HTTP requests consist of at least 7 pieces: the path, the query string, the method, the status, the headers, the body, and cookies. (Technically cookies are a subcategory of headers but they have additional behaviors that make them worth examining separately.) This article examines each of them from the perspective of their utility for carrying arbitrary data. Note: This article only looks at HTTP/1.

Least general

REST APIs often make use of HTTP methods and respo

Mocha does not reload modules when running multiple tests. This can lead to some curious errors that are difficult to understand at first, but have to do with modules that have an internal state of their own. If you have a folder with two files, test1.js and test2.js (shown in gist below), you will find you get different test results even though they are identical except in name. The first one fails, but the second succeeds.

So some state from previous tests can "pollute" later tests. This makes it difficult to write unit tests in isolation with Mocha, because suddenly when you put both tests together in the same directoy, mocha's behavior can break the tests.

Browser must have a global DatArchive object. https://beakerbrowser.com/docs/apis/dat.html

I think these ones could be supported in a client-side script using BrowserFS

	#!/bin/env python
	"""mergelog

	This is a custom merge driver for git. It should be called from git
	with a stanza in .git.config like this:

	[merge "mergelog"]
	name = A custom merge driver for my log.txt file.
	driver = ~/scripts/mergelog %O %A %B %L
	recursive = binary

	#!/bin/bash -e
	# Author: gdbtek (Nam Nguyen)
	# Repo: https://github.com/gdbtek/ubuntu-cookbooks
	# License: MIT

	###################
	# ARRAY UTILITIES #
	###################

	function arrayToString()

	// TODO: Clean up thoughts into a nice document.

	// Thoughts on Universal Data language / description
	// See: https://martin.kleppmann.com/2012/12/05/schema-evolution-in-avro-protocol-buffers-thrift.html#comment-2534873305
	/* Preface:
	Why do Thrift, Protobuf, and Avro each define their own IDL?
	I would think that there could be an implementation-independent "master" IDL
	to standardize the syntax (the semantics depends on the feature set of the implementation).
	It makes it hard to try out these different libraries when they require rewriting
	the message schema each time.

	<!DOCTYPE html>
	<html>
	<head>
	<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
	<title></title>
	</head>

	<body>
	<a href="/app.html">app.html</a>
	<br>

	// MIT License, Copyright William Hilton <[email protected]>
	// Implement the proposed W3C Quota Management API (circa 2017)
	navigator.storageQuota = {
	get supportedTypes () {
	let types = []
	if (navigator.webkitTemporaryStorage) types.push('temporary')
	if (navigator.webkitPersistentStorage) types.push('persistent')
	return types
	},
	queryInfo (type) {

	var signalhub = require('signalhub')
	var hub = signalhub('my-app', [
	'https://signalhub-jccqtwhdwc.now.sh/'
	])

	hub.subscribe('my-channel')
	.on('data', function (message) {
	console.log('new message received', message)
	})