It can be difficult to create or output some characters as JavaScript TextNodes. Typically you might try to use the ampersand notation, unfortunately the ampersand itself gets escaped to & as such becomes Use of the Unicode notation can easily resolve this issue.
Example for NBSP:
var nsbptextnode = document.createTextNode('\u00A0');
If you run a secure server, you often have some non-secure content prior to authentication of a secure session. To provide a mechanism to show a page prior to authentication, you can “sniff” for the clients capability with a small bit of JavaScript.
First establish a global variable on the page:
<script type="text/javascript">
var sslok = 0;
</script>
Then, include a JavaScript file that is ONLY available via a secure
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://www.giantgeek.com.com/secure/sniff.js"></script>
The ‘sniff.js’ file should contain (at a minimum):
sslok = 1;
Finally, check and act on the value:
<script type="text/javascript">
if (sslok === 1) {
window.location.href = 'https://www.giantgeek.com/secure/';
}
</script>
Done!
I’ve programmed in a lot of different languages, and with various IDE’s. The one area that has always been lacking is a simple means to review JavaScript code for common errors, both syntactical and format. This is where JSLint and JavaScript Lint come in…. these represent the tooling previously available to other languages like C++ and Java, where you can analyze code without actually executing it to identify problem areas. Often, these are items like ‘missing semicolons’ that occasionally cause difficult to find errors in browsers.
These can be scripted to execute from the command line or within (some) IDE’s on several operating systems.