Google Formalizes Robots Exclusion Protocol in Effort to Make It an Internet Standard
The Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) has governed the rules defining how to prevent crawlers from accessing a website since 1994. Now, Google has submitted a draft to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to make it an Internet Standard. In addition, Google has open sourced its implementation of the protocol.
The Road to Removing JQuery from Gov.uk
When the team that maintains the gov.uk website faced the issue of updating their old and outdated jQuery dependency, they decided instead to get rid of it altogether. Among other benefits, they achieved a not negligible performance improvement and, in the process, created a migration guide for other developers to tap into.
Facebook MemLab Helps Finding JavaScript Memory Leaks
While JavaScript runtimes use garbage collection to manage memory, this does not rule out the possibility of leaking memory. To detect all possible cases where memory is leaked, Facebook created and open-sourced MemLab, a tool able to run predefined, automatable test scenarios and analyze heapshot diffs.
TypeScript 5 GA Extends Decorators, Stabilizes New Module Resolution Option, and More
After announcing TypeScript 5.0 Beta three months ago, TypeScript 5 has finally reached general availability. Among the most relevant changes are extended support for decorators to enable their placement before or after export and export defaults, the new bundler module resolution option, and more.
Manifest Confusion Paves the Way to New npm Supply Chain Threats
A recent report by former npm engineering manager Darcy Clarke found that the npm registry does not validate manifest information against the contents of its corresponding package tarball. This creates a double source of truth that attackers can exploit to hide scripts or dependencies, says Clarke.