#web
12 articles tagged “web”.
The 256-Colour Survivor: Why the GIF Refuses to Die (and Why It's So Big)
It shows 256 colours, barely compresses, and a five-second clip can be ten times bigger than the same MP4 — yet the GIF is everywhere. Inside the dithering, the patent war that created PNG, the 'JIF'
Why a Two-Hour Film Fits on Your Phone: The Clever Lie Inside Every Video
Raw 1080p video weighs 11 GB a minute, yet you stream films over a phone connection. The reason is a beautiful con: most of every video isn't really there. Inside keyframes, motion vectors, and why co
The Image Format You Can Actually Read: Why SVG Is Secretly Just Text
Open an SVG in a text editor and you can read it — angle brackets, shapes, colors in plain hex. It's not a picture, it's a recipe. Here's why that changes everything, from infinite scaling to the scri
The Kansas Farm the Whole Internet Blamed: How IP Geolocation Really Works
For years a quiet farm in Potwin, Kansas was accused of the internet's crimes — all because of a rounding error in how IP addresses get mapped to places. Here's what your IP really reveals, and why it
How JPEG Quietly Throws Away Most of Your Photo (and Why You Never Notice)
Your phone photo was ten times bigger before it was saved — and most of that data was deliberately deleted. Here's the elegant mix of maths and psychology behind JPEG, what the quality slider really d
What Really Happens When a Domain Expires — and the Day Google Lost Google.com for $12
A domain isn't bought, it's rented — and what happens around its expiry date is a strange, brutal process that has tripped up everyone from bloggers to Microsoft. Inside the grace periods, drop-catchi
The alg:none Trap: How JSON Web Tokens Get Forged — and How to Sign Them Right
JWTs feel almost too clever — until you learn how they get broken. The alg:none bypass, the RS256-to-HS256 key confusion, weak-secret cracking, and the revocation problem nobody warns you about.
Base64 Isn't Encryption: What It Actually Does (and Why the Web Needs It)
It looks scrambled, so people assume it's secret — but Base64 hides nothing. Here's what Base64 really is, how 3 bytes become 4 characters, why it's 33% bigger, and where it quietly runs the internet.
Discovered, Not Invented: The Quietly Strange Story of JSON
It's the napkin-sized format that quietly runs the internet — discovered rather than invented, licensed with a joke a corporation took seriously, and frozen forever on purpose. Here's the curious hist
Hue Is an Angle: From Newton's Prism to the Color Wheel in Your Stylesheet
When you write hsl(217, 83%, 53%), that first number isn't a quantity — it's a direction on a wheel. Here's the 350-year journey from Newton's prism to the HSL color cylinder behind modern CSS.
From Phosphor Dots to #FFFFFF: The Surprising History of HEX & RGB Colors
Six characters like #2563EB light up identically on a billion screens. Here's the strange, human story behind color codes — additive light, the mystery of 255, web-safe colors, and a purple with a hea
URL Encode & Decode Guide: Master Percent-Encoding
Spaces, ampersands, and emoji can all break a URL if they're not encoded correctly. A URL encoder/decoder makes sure your links and query parameters travel safely across the web.