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.

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.

CSS Fisheye implements Ted Nelson's billowing text using CSS and Javascript. Nelson describes how it can be used to dynamically highlight text, much like OS X's icon zooming highlights an icon. The fisheye page doesn't say much in the way of utility, but points to a Flash implementation of the fisheye for use as menus in constrained spaces.

I'm ambivalent on its usage in this manner. It presents all the choices in the space available, but most of the choices are unreadable, so all the choices are not truly simultaneously presented. The true main strength is avoiding scrolling, which would make it seem the usability has increased, but its nonlinear dynamic motion could be confusing to many users. For now, it seems it is limited to esoteric glitz.

Lloyd Dalton built a cross-platform, standards-compliant color selection widget using javascript and CSS.

A method of switching stylesheets using PHP is described here. It requires cookies, but not Javascript. An earlier article describes how to do it with Javascript.