August 2008
Aug. 29, 2008
Coding Horror: Protecting Your Cookies: HttpOnly. Jeff Atwood discovers the hard way that writing an HTML sanitizer is significantly harder than you would think. HttpOnly cookies aren’t the solution though: they’re potentially useful as part of a defense in depth strategy, but fundamentally if you have an XSS hole you’re going to get 0wned, HttpOnly cookies or not. Auto-escape everything on output and be extremely cautious with things like HTML sanitizers.
New authentication schemes such as OpenID, or Microsoft's CardSpace, may help as adoption increases. These systems make it possible to register for one site using credentials verified by another. Instead of having many sites with poor verification procedures, the internet could have a few sites with strong verification procedures, that are then used by others. The advantage for the user is that they no longer have to jump through multiple hoops for each new site they encounter.
— Tim Anderson, in the Guardian
WolfenFlickr 3D—An unlikely mashup. Brilliant: Wolfenstein 3D style raycasting in JavaScript with images on the walls that have been pulled in using Flickr’s JSONP API.
Aug. 30, 2008
cascadenik: cascading sheets of style for mapnik. Great idea. Mapnik (the open source tile rendering system used by OpenStreetMap and others) has a complex style configuration based on XML. Michal Migurski has build a CSS-style equivalent which compiles down to XML, hopefully making it much quicker and easier to get started with Mapnik customisation.
addSizes.js: Snazzy automatic link file-size generation. Posted to Nat’s snazzy new blog: a script that uses my json-head API to grab the file size of linked documents on a page and insert those sizes in to the document.
Google’s undocumented favicon to png convertor (via) Showing the favicon of a domain next to a link is a really nice trick, but it’s slightly tricky to achieve as IE won’t display a .ico file if you link to it from an img element, so you need to convert the images server-side. This undocumented Google API does that for you, meaning it’s much easier to add favicons as a feature to your site.