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Seems to me that this is just perl's taint mode, implemented in a less elegant fashion (one that relies on variable name prefixes, ugh).

From perldoc perlsec:
              You may not use data derived from outside your program to affect
              something else outside your program--at least, not by accident. All
              command line arguments, environment variables, locale information (see
              perllocale), results of certain system calls ("readdir()",
              "readlink()" [snip - "and other stuff" ] and all file input are marked as "tainted".
              Tainted data may not be used directly or indirectly in any command that
              invokes a sub-shell, nor in any command that modifies files,
              directories, or processes, with the following exceptions:

http://www.webreference.com/programming/perl/taint/

In short, it's not that interesting, although if people pick it up and actually use it, it could do some good.

HTML5 has client-side storage. Yet another reason why Adobe wants HTML5 to be delayed or blocked altogether.

I really should have said HTML5 and CSS. CSS drop-down menus, transparency and the like also some great shadow and border features etc and even different developments in CSS animationwill hopefully replace flash and javascript.New HTML tags for embedding content or applications will go a long way to making flash redundant also. I hope.

CSS is used for easy and consistent page formatting across a site...

Well, yes that is ONE use for CSS, but please remember that it is Cascading Style Sheets. Style information can be embedded in the HTML itself, or in an external file. Style information in the page itself will be prioritized over CSS in an external document. This adds flexibility. HTML is about data. CSS is about presenting that data. Flash is doing what HTML and CSS should do and will soon.

I mean, the web and computers are inherently 'visual' mediums.

Which part of Hypertext Transfer Protocol are you having trouble with? Just because you spend most of your time online watching youtube videos and browsing the latest AJAX powered dynamic rollercoaster does not mean that the rest of the web, and especially the parts where real work is done, are "inherently visual". Far from it.

I'm thinking geez...what a crock. NONE of the people needing training were handicapped...yet the rules still applied...

I'd like to take you to task on this, but Steve Krug has put this far more succinctly that I ever could. Read that link to become educated about
1) Why accessibility is important
2) Why most (able bodied) developers don't care about it, and
3) Why this problem persists (We haven't automated accessibility.)

The most important point Krug makes is the real reason you should care about and implement accessibility in your websites. "It's the right thing to do."

The turbo feature works by routing all your non https content via compression servers, which can ofcourse cause slowdowns: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/03/13/opera-10-alpha-now-includes-opera-turbo-compression/

This appears to be lossy compression that reduces image quality... Hopefully pretty much all html is compressed at the source these days: http://www.webreference.com/internet/software/servers/http/compression/

Maybe not so much for painters/sketchers, but for other artists?

I agree with you on the problems of XML, but not on the solution.

The problem with XML are also inherent in JSON and every other text-based format; it builds it information-model on a thin but heavy and slippering layer of text. If you've further tried using authenticated e-mails through S/MIME or PGP, you probably seen yet a few.

Anyone using a non-ASCII-language have seen one of the issues of all current text-based formats first-hand; encoding. Text-based isn't actually a guarantee for anything, since it's not a single specification, but rather a dim view of something that is probably ASCII-compatible. (But not necessarily.)

One of the most obvious examples of this is SVG and SOAP. Both in SVG and SOAP, there is a frequent need to transfer some non-text data such as embedded bitmaps, integers, floats and possibly other elements. Done over XML (or any text-based format) this immediately becomes a very big task passing through layers of text-encoding, lexical analysis, semantical analysis, DOM-construction (not necessary with a SAX-parser but that's a it's own story), the assumption that integers will be decimal written in small-endian, and finally back to the data-structure that it actually was at the beginning. Then you're ready to actually start with the real interpretation of the data.

Alternatively, say it's an array of integers, say "here comes 320 32-bit unsigned integers" and just send them (in network-endianess). A LOT less error-prone, a LOT faster, and a LOT easier on both ends. Alternatively, say "here comes a 4mbyte bitstream" and just transfer your image. In that way, the parser may even skip the 4mbytes, since it's not really looking for the image right now. Finally, but possibly most important, if you want to transfer some text, you say "here comes 48bytes of UTF-8 text" and then send it. This way, whomever reads this will KNOW how the text is encoded, and be able to do something sensible with it, as opposed to mere guessing.

As an example of the charset-issues, just consider that in a standard XHTML-document, there will be 3 possible places to tell the client what encoding to use, and no guarantee any of them will match. First, the HTTP-header, secondly in the XML-declaration and finally in the Meta-tags. To show the problem, look at the first example of http://www.webreference.com/authoring/xhtml/coding/, where even a page trying to explain it gives of an incorrect example without mentioning the error. JSON does it slightly better, determining that all content should be encoded in a Unicode-encoding avoiding some of the issues, but instead facing the issues of Unicode http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#Issues.

So, while I agree on XML being way to heavy-wheight, I don't see JSON to be the solution, still being built on text.

Technically I should've called it ActionScript. However, ActionScript is also based on ECMAScript 2, like javascript, so in my mind they're basically the same. Here's a quick ref:

http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript /j_s/column2/

It's not impossible to detect Opera. There are several methods available through Google to help you. Since I'm a good AC, I'll give you one to start with:

http://www.webreference.com/tools/browser/javascri pt.html

Some Microsoft sites used to send Opera specifically bad CSS sheets, most notably MSN and MSDN. The sheets set floating div offsets into the negative to give the appearance that Opera was at fault. I'm one of the many who emailed Microsoft expressing my feelings towards this practice, and today I can browse those sites with Opera with ease.

Also, even though I'm a bad AC and can't find a reference (hopefully someone can help me out here), it's come to my attention recently that one of the original authors of the CSS spec is working at Opera Software. Granted, some of the things Opera does with CSS are different than IE/Firefox, but overall to someone who uses multiple browsers (and develops for multiple browsers) at the same time I think it should be apparent that Opera's support for the existing CSS spec is superior to other offerings. I'm not familiar with any Firefox CSS-enhancing plugins, but I always develop my CSS for Opera and then tweak it so that it works in anything else out-of-the-box that breaks it, be it IE or Firefox.

Yeah, but how do you know that WebSideStory's numbers aren't taken from sites that attract mostly Windows-only users? For all we know, some of the sites that they monitor could exclude all non-IE browsers.

That seems highly unlikely, given that many of WSS's customers are large global corporations that have big, professionally-created websites- Disney, Best Buy, Fox News, Bank of America, Freddie Mac- a wide range of clients in a variety of sectors. Surely some of their sites exclude non-IE browsers, but they are unlikely to make a significant difference in WSS's numbers.

But my point was not that WebSideStory's numbers are accurate, although by the fact that it is their business to know this kind of stuff and they seem to have been around a while I tend to believe them, but merely that the visitors to your site are not likely to be anywhere near a representative sample of the internet at large. There's lots of info out there that seems to corroborate WSS's numbers. Your little window on the world is nowhere near the big picture that WSS is seeing.

Google used to list this stuff in their zeitgeist, but they seem to have stopped that. Too bad...

You're missing what is meant by "gzip". The above posters are referring to on-the-fly gzip compression of the http stream by the web server as the pages are requested. They're not talking about gzipping the individual files and offering them for download that way.

Anyone running Apache can install mod_gzip, which compresses the served content and sends it to the browser, which decompresses and renders it. for further info, see this rather old article.

Since we're sharing. My plate says "NET GOD". I've been asked if I'm a tennis player or a hockey goalie. :)

BTW, there is a whole gallery of plates like this: http://webreference.com/outlook/license/gallery.ht ml

You also have stuff like Rhino that makes Javascript a _compiled_ language. You also have a .NET Jscript compiler. So, Javascript _can_ be a compiled language.

Semantic web is not something you can thing of as a concrete application nor we can consider it mature. As you surely read, semantic web is an extention of the current web. So I can link you to firefox or some HTML editor. Joke aside, it is more complicated than that and if you want to embrass semantic web you should get to know XML, RDF and OWL (in this order). In fact, if you are not working to build sw, you should consider another approach. I suggest you to look at RSS there and foaf which are IMHO concrete, but limited, examples of semantic web working examples.

As a web developper... try to generate web pages from RDF (mindswap as some tools) or XML (ala gentoo) source.

A simple googling of "http gzip" would yield pages such as this. It explains quite well how HTTP compression works, but also shows that not all web servers support it equally well.

Surely you can't be talking about the International Herald Tribune. The only clean, elegant, readable news site on the web? It looks great in IE and Firefox; what browser are you using?

Someone obvously put a lot of thought into designing this site. Text is arranged in narrow columns, making it more natural to read, kinda like a real newspaper. Navigation is intuitive; printing and emailing articles is easy. What more could you want?

The Beauty Queen
Functional and substantial... compelling...
The designer is a god among mortals..."

In terms of design, Google:search::IHT:news

Loads of people are still on Internet Explorer 5 today, that was released over five years ago

Actually, most sites that track this sort of thing show about 75% of all users on IE6, but only around 10% on IE5.

Some examples:
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2004/January/brows er.php
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp
http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/bstats/latest.html
http://www.webreference.com/stats/browser.html

Some points:

The name is ECMAScript - one word, not two.

The only thing nonstandard is Microsoft's bastardized implementation of what it calls JScript. JScript is not ECMAScript/JavaScript.

ECMAScript/JavaScript was not was not "created by a standards board" as you claim. It was created by Brendan Eich when he was at Netscape.

It is not a piece of junk. It is a very interesing prototype based with major influences from Self.

Clearly you don't know what you're talking about.

You probably can... if you can't directly connect to a stream, you can use the Windows Media Player, and Open a URL. It will use your browser's proxy settings, unlike Winamp. But for me that only plays for an hour or so. Try making an ASX file and load that into WMP.

As a bugzilla member who's worked on a lot of evangelism bugs, I can tell you that the problem is 99% likely to be bad DHTML on your site. Please post the URL here, or submit it to Bugzilla for investigation.

BTW, the exact symptoms you describe are often seen in HierMenus 4.0, due to non-compliant CSS-P. If your site uses HierMenus, updating to v4.2 or higher will fix the problem.

Come on, the timecube guy is obviously a master at modern UI deign and html layout. :-)

Seriously though, here are some sites whose design I like:

Sweetcode

Mathworld

openrbl.org

perldoc

Paul Borke's website

the Joel On Software forums

the Tech Report (a debatable choice, but the best of its type)

Dmitry's Design Lab

Yep, your file will go through at 0.9x of the regular speed (slower). This is less than 5x faster, so they win! All they are guaranteeing is a maximum speed (5x faster), and that's not hard to do. Stupid, yes. Truth in advertising, yes.

The vast majority of 56k modems already do compression, CSLIP compresses headers, and HTML compression is already built into modern browsers. What's left is caching, image-size/quality reduction, and pop-up blocking. AOL already does two of those three - take a guess which two!!

Ya think? Just check out one of the sites he founded, webreference.com. People take web design advice from that example?!

majority? Are you sure?

Anyone using CSS at all would be aware of bug in
every browser, even Opera: Real-world example

There are no chance that they would have gone through the process to server different code to different browsers without testing it out afterwards.

IE on macintosh is reported to work very good, and there are XML engine updates for Windows to download. This all points to the fact that microsoft is very capable of actually supporting the standards, but we also know that standards would give people no reason to prefer IE over some other browser.

There is an excellent web site called Dmitry's Design Lab that shows you how all the standard elements of design (color, shape, texture, etc.) apply to web sites. He is also one of the authors of the book HTML Unleashed, if you've ever read that. Personally I find it quite fascinating site because I'm usually up to speed on the technical details but when it comes to the actual concepts of design I start venturing away from my areas of knowledge. Anyway, the article on fonts is a great read. It goes over a lot of the history behind fonts, and explains some of the terminology.

There is an excellent web site called Dmitry's Design Lab that shows you how all the standard elements of design (color, shape, texture, etc.) apply to web sites. He is also one of the authors of the book HTML Unleashed, if you've ever read that. Personally I find it quite fascinating site because I'm usually up to speed on the technical details but when it comes to the actual concepts of design I start venturing away from my areas of knowledge. Anyway, the article on fonts is a great read. It goes over a lot of the history behind fonts, and explains some of the terminology.

it's supposed to be object-oriented but there's no way to decalare class or methods

Furthermore, there are ways of declaring classes, although the keyword class is never used. It's not a particularily powerful language, agreed. But in an environment such as the web, flexibility is a must and JavaScript provides it very well.

I think it's well suited for what it's used for.

HTML Help
WASP would be a good place for all newbs to start.
WASP
Find Tutorials is a good general tutorial finder.

PHP
First LAMP tutorial
PHP.net
PHP Help

There are tons of good .asp sites out there, but my guess is that's not what slashdotters are looking for....

Dynamic HTML support.

Mozilla and IE offer a reasonably full DOM model of every loaded page. Every tag is represented in there, and essentially all atributes are categorised and changeable. Done in realtime, too -- have a look at the JavaScript Object Browser script on my homepage.

Opera's JS documentation, meanwhile, can be browsed in about 10 minutes. It has light JS 1.1 support -- not all properties implemented, compared to Mozilla's full JS 1.5. Its DOM is inferior in places to Netscape 4 -- as of v6, you cannot yet dynamically create positioned elements, clip content, or replace content of elements. It can't even run the above script I linked -- it doesn't even index its DOM properties correctly, so you can't say "tell me all properties of the 'window' object" like you can in every other browser.

Don't even get me started on how Opera Lies, pretending to be IE and making it an incredible pain to code in workarounds for its shortcomings.

So yes, Opera has blazingly fast HTML+CSS support, but it has sacrified good JavaScript and DHTML abilities to get it -- it's about 5 years behind the 8-ball, depending on how you want to count it.

I'd recommend Mozilla for the moment for most sites, hopefully Opera 7 will improve on this situation sometime -- the Opera developers have said DOM support is part of their eventual plans.

Opera... I've got v5.12 and v6.00 installed at home, and am moderately impressed. It handles HTML and CSS pretty well (at least on most sites), but my major complaint is its JavaScript support.

Opera Lies. Default installs pretend to be IE, adjusting the userAgent string and adding some of IE's DOM properties. This isn't so bad... document.all works, for instance, but try something like document.body.insertAdjacentHTML and things will go belly up rapidly. Things like clipping, dynamic DIV creation and innerHTML are still not implemented -- as of v6 it's still playing catchup to Netscape 4 in these areas. So you need to detect Opera specifically in any advanced project to do workarounds.

A good test to distinguish between browsers used to be for document.createElement, which IE and NS6 support but Opera 5 didn't. For those of you not familiar with the DOM this allows you to create tags anytime and place them in the document. Run this in Opera 5 and 6:

alert(document.createElement);

and you'll find that v6 reports it exists. But it doesn't -- it's simply a blank function, to allow more pages to think they can run in Opera. This is pretty foolish -- if a coder like me decides a page requires that ability to run, why report that it exists when it clearly doesn't?

So in conclusion, hopefully Opear v7 will clear this up and implement proper DOM1 support (that is, beyond getElementById and similar). Until then, I'll browse with IE6 or Mozilla.

(Random note: Anyone know if Konqueror can or has been ported to Windows? I'd be interested to try that too as an alternative... and don't have the HD space for a Linux partition).

I'm surprised nobody mentioned that Opera has stuff like pipelining and http compression since version 5. I was a staunch Mozilla supporter until I discovered Opera -- so far it has been able to do everything I need, and more. The keyboard shortcuts are a big plus point. Tabbed browsing has been around for ages in Opera. Browsing with Opera is a very fulfilling experience.

There is quite a bit of research out there that suggests that most people find 3d navigation imposssibly hard to understand/use. Here are some relevant links:

Summary of book on Web Usability

Why 3-D navigation is bad (People aren't frogs)

Not to mention how to you display such things to a reader who is blind or has any other type of disability... the list goes on. Beautiful idea, but not very good in practice.

I don't feel it's sufficient that most but not all people can access the Olympics site. That could be said about sidewalks without ramps for wheelchairs, too -- most people can step up the step fine, so why bother with ramps. Some people just don't get it until they're the ones in the wheelchairs. Yet others are donating their Saturdays to pouring the cement and paying for the supplies, too. Seems to be the way the world goes around.

The point in my initial review that Andy King then picked up for WebReference.com is not at all that they're using frames, Flash, JavaScript, and PDF -- those are all fine. The developers didn't also follow the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to include the NOSCRIPT tags, the NOFRAMES tags and other recommendations that would provide the alternate means of accessing the site.

The reason I wrote about this site in particular is because of the Olympics being such a major worldwide event and its even greater importance for anyone in the world to be able to access. If the developers had included the elements I mentioned above and in my review (and Andy's too), people who've turned off JavaScript (and there are plenty of them out there), using screen readers, Lynx, or other devices wouldn't be completely locked out as they are now.

There is a content-encoding plugin for Apache called mod_gzip that will do the server end, for any output including dynamic. I've not tried it, but on face value it's a standards-based way of getting what you want.

I think, although I can't find it for sure, that LWP supports gzip content-encoding too, which would mean that things like SOAP::Lite and XML-RPC would benefit too.

more about the content-encoding thing

http://www.webreference.com/new/grammar/2.html

Quoth the web page:

He always puts his punctuation on the outside of quotes like this: "Off with their heads"! It's not the recommended style for American English. However, British English typically uses punctuation on the outside. This is an example of where there is no hard and fast rule. It's best to go by the styles of your organization or company.

So, if you like, you can put your punctuation on the the outside of your quotes, provided you also spell like a Brit: "colour", "flavour", "tyre" - to name a few.

That sort of leaves you between a rock and a hard place, doesn't it? :)

http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xm l/rss/intro/ Appreciate any other feedback.

Also, I included a direct link to the intro to RSS piece:

http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xm l/rss/intro/

But they commit a couple cardinal sins:

• On this page the hierarchical menus pop out, but you don't click on the popped-out part, and you can't tell that easily because the cursor doesn't change properly when it's over the link part.
• On this page they have a small word that's the link to a site, and then a much larger spelled-out URL which isn't a link! I wonder if they've ever actually tried to use their pages...

  I'm sure webreference is great and all, but they haven't made a good first impression on me :)

Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!

But they commit a couple cardinal sins:

• On this page the hierarchical menus pop out, but you don't click on the popped-out part, and you can't tell that easily because the cursor doesn't change properly when it's over the link part.
• On this page they have a small word that's the link to a site, and then a much larger spelled-out URL which isn't a link! I wonder if they've ever actually tried to use their pages...

  I'm sure webreference is great and all, but they haven't made a good first impression on me :)

Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!

On a related note, Web Reference really does some fine stuff. Of particular note is the HierMenu script, which uses DHTML to simulate pulldown menus (it works in Netscape v4+, IE v4+, and even Mozilla). It's not Free, but still free. Major websites (such as Merrill Lynch and Trilogy Software) use the script all the time.

Alex Bischoff
---

On a related note, Web Reference really does some fine stuff. Of particular note is the HierMenu script, which uses DHTML to simulate pulldown menus (it works in Netscape v4+, IE v4+, and even Mozilla). It's not Free, but still free. Major websites (such as Merrill Lynch and Trilogy Software) use the script all the time.

Alex Bischoff
---

On a related note, Web Reference really does some fine stuff. Of particular note is the HierMenu script, which uses DHTML to simulate pulldown menus (it works in Netscape v4+, IE v4+, and even Mozilla). It's not Free, but still free. Major websites (such as Merrill Lynch and Trilogy Software) use the script all the time.

Alex Bischoff
---

So I rolled my own, well actually I snagged the useful phpHoo, read the pages at webreference to lend myself a clue and put it up where I've got some cheap hosting. Now I just have to remember to use it instead of the browser bookmark functions. Advantages, well, its searchable, its available as long as my host is up, It lets you create tree like organization kind of like Yahoo, and some other stuff I can't think of now. It doesn't import other bookmarks, but I think that would be a good challenge for my limited skills. I also think some buttons tied to 'scriptlets' for the most popular browsers would be a great useability addition, that way you could make the system nearly as painless as a bookmark file.

Looks like some more stuff has come out since I did this, I might take another look at the alternatives. But take a look at phpHoo and its relatives, they just might work like you want them to.

To the other reply, I'll add my recommendation of RichInStyle, featuring giant bug table, plus bug-demo and css test pages. He's working on mapping support in less mainstream browsers, like different Konqueror versions and W3C's Amaya, and has a decent cross-compatibility tutorial.

On the non-css side, the Anybrowser site has useful tips, and HTML with Style pushes structure first, then layout. For "what works in what" info, there's the results pages of Robin's HTML 4 Conformance Tests and Ian Hickson's Evil Test Suite.

PS. Your timetable looks fine in BeOS's NetPositive 2.2, except that without a body bgcolor, Net+ defaults to grey, and imho, the Windows-1252 charset declaration is unnecessary.

Does anyone know of a place (on the web etc) where you can get a compact list of most of the common core of tags support by both the HTML standard and most browsers (ie. both IE and NS)as well as a list of unsupported browser specific tags.

NCD's tag/browser guide (good up to 4/5 of NS/IE), with the results of Robin's HTML 4 Conformance Tests, and Ian Hickson's Evil Test Suite for more outré browsers.

For more detail on usage/display, I recommend Webreference.com's report on html4/extensions in the 4.x browsers and Index Dot Html (big two, plus Mosaic/Opera). Hope this helps.

Hello XHML (HTML described in XML)

As other posters have noted, a lot of problems have been caused by the so called "race to the bottom" where current browsers try to render the worst HTML code possible.

That is exactly why we need XHTML where the authors are forced to write DTD compliant documents to start off with or they simply will not be displayed.

This means that the people writing XML processors for a given browser don't have to worry about supporting anything outside the specification. (Although displaying useful error messages for incorrect documents may be a sticky point)

For a good description on why we need XHTML, see http://www.webreference.com/xml/column6/

Several sites such as this one have a look up, punch in the domain and it spits out the IP. BTW /. is 64.28.67.48

And did you notice that "webreference.com" isn't mentioned in the Slashdot article and that Andy King doesn't lead to "Andrew King, Managing Editor (aking@internet.com)", it only leads to the WebReference mainpage, and he didn't start the story by saying,"We here at WebReference interview the design diva herself, Lynda Weinman.", he just says we. timothy should have caught and fixed that.

And did you notice that "webreference.com" isn't mentioned in the Slashdot article and that Andy King doesn't lead to "Andrew King, Managing Editor (aking@internet.com)", it only leads to the WebReference mainpage, and he didn't start the story by saying,"We here at WebReference interview the design diva herself, Lynda Weinman.", he just says we. timothy should have caught and fixed that.