news
Webring, Mozilla/Firefox, and Standards
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Clayton Errington ☛ Improving the webring links, one build at a time
If you have ever clicked the little ← and → arrows on a member’s site, you have used the plumbing that ties Static.Quest together. Those links are how a web ring works: every site points to the next and previous member, and visitors can walk the whole circle without ever visiting the hub. This post is a look at how those links worked until recently, what was wrong with them, and how we made them better while staying 100% static.
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Mozilla
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Firefox Tooling Announcements: Happy BMO Push Day! (20260824.1)
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Mozilla ☛ Hacks.Mozilla.Org: Intent to Ship: JPEG XL
It isn’t often that new image formats land in browsers. In the early 2000s we had JPEG, GIF, and PNG. The 2010s gave us WebP, which was a modest step up from JPEG. But the 2020s have given us two new image formats that are a big step up from previous formats: Hey Hi (AI) and JPEG XL.
We shipped Hey Hi (AI) back in 2021, and today we posted our intent to ship JPEG XL. Chrome are also intending to ship, and given there’s already a partial implementation in Safari, the format will be supported across browsers before the end of the year.
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Wrlach ☛ William Lachance: Glean Dictionary + DuckDB
While working on Writing the Docs: 2026 Edition, I experimented a bit with updating the Glean Dictionary to incorporate some of the ideas in the essay, in particular those around reference documentation.
As a sort of demonstration that documentation about an application can be treated as a data product in and of itself, I hacked up a quick ETL pipeline to dump the JSON output of the Glean Dictionary into a DuckDB database that can be queried standalone.
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Mozilla ☛ Intent to Ship: JPEG XL
It isn’t often that new image formats land in browsers. In the early 2000s we had JPEG, GIF, and PNG. The 2010s gave us WebP, which was a modest step up from JPEG. But the 2020s have given us two new image formats that are a big step up from previous formats: AVIF and JPEG XL.
We shipped AVIF back in 2021, and today we posted our intent to ship JPEG XL. Chrome are also intending to ship, and given there’s already a partial implementation in Safari, the format will be supported across browsers before the end of the year.
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Standards/Consortia
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Rachel Kaufman ☛ Fun With DNS TXT Records
This poses a problem. Some TXT records, especially when we’re talking about DKIM records, are very, very long. Some DNS providers are kind enough to accept a large string and split it behind the scenes, but others, such as AWS Route53, follows the spec to the letter. (Aside, if I’m reading this spec correctly, every DNS record, not just TXT, is capped at 255 characters, it’s just that other types of records rarely if ever get that large). If you need to add a long TXT record to Route53 or other providers that follow the spec, you must manually split the record; the resolver handles concatenating the strings back together into a larger record.
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Aman Mittal ☛ Adding Content-Signal to a docs site
Cloudflare announced the Content Signals Policy in September 2025 as an extension to robots.txt. It is one policy with three flags, each set to yes or no. In a nutshell, if you add it, this is what it looks like in your robots.txt file: [...]
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