news
Standards/Consortia: Creative Commons, ePub, and SWIM Protocol
-
Creative Commons ☛ Integrating Choices in Open Standards: CC Signals and the RSL Standard
At Creative Commons, we’ve long believed that binary systems rarely reflect the complexity of the real world—nor do they serve the commons very well. The internet, like the communities that built it, thrives on nuance, experimentation, and shared stewardship. That’s why we’re continuously working to introduce choice where there has been little, and to advocate for systems that acknowledge the diversity of values and needs across the web. CC signals is one expression of that thinking, and lately we’ve been exploring how those ideas can travel into other emerging standards that are shaping the future of the web.
-
Manuel Matuzović ☛ How HTML changes in ePub
ePub is the W3C standard for ebooks. It lets you take your knowledge of the web, and use it to produce little self-contained sets of documents that can be freely distributed as a single file ready for reading on extremely low-power devices, and they even reflow to fit any screen.
Yet while I said that you can use your knowledge of the web to build ePubs, the technology in use is twisted in unforeseen ways, and you might have to unlearn the things you think you knew. Prepare yourself…
-
Ben Congdon ☛ SWIM: Outsourced Heartbeats
How does a distributed system reliably determine when one of its members has failed? This is a tricky problem: you need to deal with unreliably networks, the fact that nodes can crash at arbitrary times, and you need to do so in a way that can scale to thousands of noes. This is the role of a failure detection system, and is one of the most foundational parts of many distributed systems.
There are many rather simple ways to solve this problem, but one of the most elegant solutions to distributed failure detection is an algorithm that I first encountered in undergraduate Computer Science: the SWIM Protocol.1 SWIM here stands for “Scalable Weakly Consistent Infection-style Process Group Membership”.