Google Introduces Page Creator

Seoulstriker writes "Google has introduced an AJAX web-publishing application called Google Page Creator. The app is great for getting whatever photos, information, files you want published, and it doesn't have to be in the typical blog format. The published site is hosted at the gmail user page. There are several templates and page formats to work from, and as far as I can tell, everything is WYSIWYG. The published HTML is very clean, but it does have some leftover fragments from editing pages repeatedly. If you want to be precise, you can manually edit the HTML. There is a Google Groups page available for the service. It took about 30 seconds to get a rudimentary page online." PC World has a quick rundown on the service at their site.

Comments

file hosting limit

[Seoulstriker]

Apparently the file storage limit is 100mb. Not sure if there's a limit to the data transferred.

For a free service its not bad

[majortom1981]

for a free service that gives you 100mb of storage its not bad. I signed up and tested it. Your pages do not have any adds and you get 100mb for free. Even if you do not want to create a website its not bad for hosting picture files and other things.

No Safari support yet

[Chris_Jefferson]

Slightly annoying, no safari support yet, only internet explorer and firefox (couldn't check opera).

Re:How good is it

[NickFitz]

The markup seems to be striving to be as bad as Front Page. Somebody should tell them that <font> elements are very GeoCities 1997, that <p> elements can't be nested, and that creating a bunch of <div class="foo"> elements isn't that much better than nested tables. I thought Google could afford to hire competent people?

Drew McLellan has knocked together a page in which all of the above flaws can be seen.

A sterling job on the XSS defenses though

[buro9]

Had a play earlier as I was worried you might be susceptible to a similar thing as the MySpace "Samy is my hero" style XSS attack.

The following was witnessed:

• Inserting script tags = tags removed before publishing.
• Inserting style tags = tags removed before publishing.
• Inserting element on events (onclick, onblur, etc) = attributes stripped before publishing.
• Inserting basic element style attributes = tags left in, style applied.
• Inserting advanced element style attributes (stuff that can rewrite DOM) = just those attributes stripped, formatting attributes left intact.

So for all of the basics, the Google Page thingy passes all basic tests on XSS attacks.

Well done :)

I'm even recommended it on my forum already because the security gives me enough peace of mind to not regret doing so.

Re:How good is it - it does NOT VALIDATE ;-)

[generic-man]

Since when has Google ever cared about W3C validation? Google.com has 51 errors, an amazingly high number considering how small the page is visually.