From a 1989 memo a CERN manager called "vague but exciting" to the living standard that runs everything: URIs, HTTP, and HTML; Mosaic and Netscape; the browser wars; the W3C; the XHTML dead end; and the HTML5 rescue.
Standards
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The History of the Web -
RCS Messaging RCS finally replaced SMS as the default carrier-grade messaging protocol, and the rollout was uglier than the marketing implied. We walk what Universal Profile actually standardizes, the carrier/Jibe split, the Apple interoperability saga, what end-to-end encryption covers in 2026 and what it does not, the SMS fallback that ruins your assumptions, and the honest cross-platform state of the messaging world.
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HDMI vs DisplayPort: The Protocol War at the End of Your Cable Two digital video standards, two governance models, and a rivalry that has almost nothing to do with picture quality. How HDMI's FRL and DisplayPort's UHBR lanes actually move pixels, why DisplayPort daisy-chains and HDMI owns your TV, the open-source licensing fight that keeps HDMI 2.1 off open Linux drivers, and how to pick the right cable for the right device.
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How Standards Bodies Actually Work The protocols you use every day were written by committees with wildly different rules, incentives, and failure modes. A tour of IETF rough consensus, IEEE 802 working groups, the ISO pay-to-read problem, the WHATWG/W3C fork, USB naming disasters, FRAND patent pools, and how an individual engineer can actually get in the room.