W3C

Category Archives: Systems

Observations from our initial https redirection tests

We recently announced that we are planning to start redirecting all of www.w3.org to https, as is commonly done elsewhere. To get an understanding of whether this change is feasible for our site and what issues might arise, we conducted some limited tests of this configuration change, on August 1 and August 18-19. Here are […]
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Redirecting to https on all of www.w3.org

W3C’s main web site www.w3.org has been available via https for over a decade, but until now we have not been redirecting all requests to https as is commonly done on most other sites. The primary reason for this is that we wanted to avoid causing issues for software requesting machine-readable resources from www.w3.org such […]
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preventing non-www hostnames from being indexed

W3C’s main web site www.w3.org is load-balanced over a number of servers using the excellent HAProxy load balancing software. Before we discovered HAProxy we used round-robin DNS for a number of years, with www.w3.org rotated among a number of servers with names like web1.w3.org, web2.w3.org, etc. One unfortunate side effect of this practice was that […]
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List-Id: for filtering mail from W3C lists

There are a number of email message headers that people may use to filter messages from W3C lists. The best header to use for this purpose is List-Id: (specified in RFC 2919), because this header is intended to remain constant throughout the lifetime of a list. Using other headers to filter mail from our lists […]
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Validator 0.8.6 release wraps up a year’s worth of bug fixes and code clean-up

Over the past year, millions of pages were validated every day using W3C’s services. We’d like to thank those who keeping service running smoothly by helping other users, carefully reporting problems, and developing code. We’d especially like to thank Ville Skyttä for continuing maintenance of the validator check perl script and Henri Sivonen for continuing […]
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