The unlikely trio MUST, SHOULD, and MAY in internet standards — In March of 1997, Scott Bradner penned a short memo titled “Key Words For Use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels”. It is more commonly referred to as simply RFC 2119. The entire document fits comfortably on two pages of paper. That memo would go on to become the single…

The World Wide Web’s hypertext markup language (HTML) has an inherent beauty all its own: Both the author’s words and the typographer’s instructions are contained in a single plain text file. Instructions are encoded using short, easily remembered mnemonics. Mnemonics are wrapped into pairs of less-than/greater-than tags which are easily…

Accuracy · Usability · Safety · Compliance — Every once in a while we come across a truly delightful piece of software: one that lets us accomplish something significant, that’s intuitively clear to operate, that safely and privately handles our needs, and that complies with industry standards and legal requirements. We can easily recognize the excellent quality of…

The classic, brilliant PNPOLY algorithm that dates back to 1970 — W. Randolph Franklin’s “point inclusion in polygon” algorithm weighs in at just seven lines of C code. It’s intuitively easy to understand, yet fast enough to work with sophisticated GIS datasets. It’s one of those gems that every advanced programmer should know. This article demonstrates how to use Franklin’s PNPOLY…

Choosing the right approach to personal data versus big data — This world is being assembled, in bits and pieces, from our interactions with technology: the tracking and surveillance of our movements; the communications and transactions of our commerce; the words and pictures of our inner circle; the desires and fears of our search for knowledge; and even the patterns and…

Correctly configuring CORS for content-type: application/json — The use of dynamic requests to backend servers is prevalent in modern web applications. Despite its commonplace nature, there are some gotchas that trip up even experienced developers. TL;DR In order to successfully preflight a JSON-encoded request to a different domain, the browser’s fetch request must include the HTTP header access-control-request-headers…

How to use the browser’s Intersection Observer for a positive user experience — At some point in our lives, most of us have whiled away the time reading one thing after another on the internet, as our fancy dictates. Lazy surfing the web is a pleasure all unto itself. No one knows what rabbit hole we may go down, or what pearls may…

* And every place that doesn’t — Software developers work with dates and times on a regular basis. We understand the rules for determining leap years, the methods for calculating time spans, and the proper use of time offsets from Coordinated Universal Time. Unfortunately, when it comes to summer-time versus winter-time there’s…