blooblog

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 834489 announced an upcoming fix for the Internet Explorer username exploit that masked malicious website URLs. If you use any links that look like

http(s)://username:password@server/resource.ext

then any updated browsers will not follow them. The article provides workarounds for server backends and client scripting. The HTTP login URL format was never in the official standard. Note that this does not affect FTP login URLs.

For nearly a decade, tables and layout were synonymous when concerned with web design. Only recently has the drive towards CSS positioning finally allowed tables to be relegated to the unfashionable pile. Don't forget, however, that tables had a clear purpose from the beginning: to present tabular data.

In case you forgot all the tags not used for layouts, such as thead and colgroup, this Advanced Tables Tutorial has all the info you need to properly structure your data.

The NILS Australia has released a beta version of their Accessibility Toolbar for Internet Explorer. It is free, licensed under the Creative Commons license.

Not to leave other browsers out, there is the Web Developer Extension for Mozilla and Firebird.

While relying on client-side scripting, there are always bookmarklets for Opera and cross-browser.

A common tip, sometimes handed down as admonishment, to web designers was to never think of translating print to the web. The web, the advice went, is platformless, and a design is not guaranteed to be the same across them. Ignoring the advice, designers targetted specific browsers with pixel-perfect placement.

Now the age of separating content from design is here, where semantic structure is on equal footing with aesthetics. The International Herald Tribune's article layout system is a great inspiration towards creating a web that satisfies everyone. While it does use tables for layout, the article's semantic structure is nearly there. It requires client-side scripting for the familiar newspaper columnar article layout, but it would be possible to have a similar system degrade gracefully to the standard vertically-scrolling web layout.

The possibilities have been presented, and it's up to us to deliver them.