Echoes
Past infrastructure decisions echoing in today's production realities
Echoes
Past infrastructure decisions echoing in today's production realities
When HTML Forked: The Compromise That Never Ended
In February 1996, the HTML Editorial Review Board struck a deal: Netscape would remove blink tag from the specification if Microsoft removed marquee tag. Both companies agreed. Browsers kept supporting them anyway.
The negotiation revealed something structural. Between 1991 and 1996, HTML had forked into two incompatible paradigms—markup that describes what content is versus markup that controls how it looks. The compromise became permanent. Today, when you extract data across thousands of sites at scale, you're not just parsing HTML. You're interpreting two design philosophies that were never reconciled.
When HTML Forked: The Compromise That Never Ended
In February 1996, the HTML Editorial Review Board struck a deal: Netscape would remove blink tag from the specification if Microsoft removed marquee tag. Both companies agreed. Browsers kept supporting them anyway.
The negotiation revealed something structural. Between 1991 and 1996, HTML had forked into two incompatible paradigms—markup that describes what content is versus markup that controls how it looks. The compromise became permanent. Today, when you extract data across thousands of sites at scale, you're not just parsing HTML. You're interpreting two design philosophies that were never reconciled.
One Echo This Week
December 2011: RFC 6455 standardized WebSocket. Developers celebrated real-time communication without polling hacks. Infrastructure teams got a problem that still hasn't resolved.
HTTP assumed connections die fast. Single request, single response, close the socket. Every layer of the network stack optimized for this: firewalls tracked brief sessions, load balancers expected quick turnover, proxies aggressively timed out idle connections.
WebSocket flipped it. Now servers hold thousands of connections open indefinitely. Firewalls don't recognize the traffic pattern. Proxies kill sessions they think are stalled. Memory pools sized for transient requests exhaust under persistent load.
Fourteen years later, HTTP polling remains more common than WebSocket across the top million sites. The infrastructure never caught up. When you choose between polling and persistent connections today, you're navigating consequences of that 2011 inversion.
Papers That Built Infrastructure
CAP Theorem Proved the Impossible Triangle
Papers That Built Infrastructure
Fielding's Dissertation Documented the Web's Hidden Architecture
Papers That Built Infrastructure
MapReduce Made Distributed Processing Accessible
Papers That Built Infrastructure
Bigtable Showed How to Store Petabytes
Today's Debates Yesterday's Decisions
