Now that HTML5 support has grown, and Apple continues to resist Flash on their IOS devices, it may be advantageous to make use of the newer markup standard in your web applications.
There are currently three separate methods to convert your Flash applications:
I’ve found that many developers (including myself) that have been coding javascript for some time don’t realize that javascript added the try/catch pattern from Java quite a while ago and that all modern browsers support it.
Here’s the standard pattern, the ‘finally’ of course is optional for when you require it.
try{
// put your code here that may experience a runtime error/exception, i will show division by zero in this example
var x = 1;
alert(x/0);
}
catch(e){
if(e instanceof Error){
alert(‘an error has occurred:name=’ + e.name + ‘|message=’ + e.message);
} else {
alert(‘an unknown exception has occurred’);
}
}
finally{
alert(‘now we are done’);
}
A little more on this… like in Java, there are types of Errors, and you can rely upon ‘instanceof’ to determine them appropriately, here are a few of the common types in JavaScript 1.5:
REFERENCE:
http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/JavaScript/Exception-Handling-in-JavaScript-Using-Multiple-Exception-Handlers/
Cheers
This topic, and Firefox add-on have received a lot of press lately, as such I figured that I’d capture some comments on the topic. HTTP Session hijacking is nothing new, anyone with the ability to monitor your non-secured network traffic can do this with little effort… what’s happened here is that there are now some really simple to use tools to do the job.
In the past, someone would have to passively monitor your network traffic with a tool like WireShark, and all they’d really have to do is wait for you to access a website to watch the ‘HTTP Cookies’ (or even a URL that contains a ‘session id’). With that information, they simply need to use the same value that you do to essentially take over your session and your current state. Banks are particularly at risk for this, but in most cases they use HTTPS/SSL for all secure data including logins. Social websites such as Facebook and even GMail, often default to non-secure logins to maximize their server and network performance.
Best defense here… never use non-secure login forms, especially when using a public wireless (or wired) network.
Interesting enough, there’s now a Firefox add-on that monitors for usage of Firesheep on the network, unfortunately neither of these currently work in Linux… links below!
If you’ve been online at all in the last decade, you’ve heard of the “dangers” of HTTP Cookies. More nefarious and harder to remove are Flash Cookies as they are handled by a plugin/extension/addon to the browser and exist outside of the normal security settings.
To see or delete Flash data, you’ve got to visit the following URL:
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html
You will probably be suprised to see many of the sites listed, as Flash is often being used to present you with ads in addition to the interactive elements that you might expect.
REFERENCES:
Okay, so this one’s a little old, and I just found it while looking at some of Microsoft Update’s HTML source, it appears to be relevant for MSIE6 and newer and may be responsible for some interesting styling and behaviour of form components.
A quick search for it turns up lots of discussions about other browers such as Firefox being effected if the value is not defined… as such it’s likely a good idea to define it in your pages to be sure.
An old MSDN entry reads…
When running on Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6 and the content displayed in it sports a look and feel that matches the Windows XP platform. You can opt to have your HTML content not take on the same look as the operating system for elements such as buttons and scroll bars, by adding the following META tag:
<meta http-equiv="MSThemeCompatible" content="no" />
Setting this will disable theme support for the document. Some background on this, Windows XP (MSIE6) allows for the use of themes for the operating system to change the general color scheme of many elements.
As such, many HTML components (such as SELECT dropdowns, BUTTONS and INPUT fields ‘MAY’ also be effected if you don’t explicitly prevent it in your code.
There was some support for this in Mozilla Firefox builds for Windows, as such, while I’d normally recommend using a conditional comment, I’m torn in this case.
Cheers
Testing web applications with various versions of MSIE (Internet Explorer) often proves problematic as it’s generally not possible to have more than one version installed on a single Windows installation. There are various approaches, such as:
NOTE: the final method above has some quirks, but you can generally use it for preliminary testing by developers as it’s obviously easier to maintain.
Here are a few common packages that I’m aware of:
Happy testing!
Through the years, I’ve had to develop, maintain and support software on a variety of systems. Unfortunately, it’s often impossible to maintain specific software versions or configurations installed on physical machines. In the realm of web development, this becomes increasingly complex because of the rapid release of multiple browser versions.
To aid in testing, I’ve found that it’s often best to run these configurations in Virtual Machines, I’ve used VirtualPC and VMWare in the past, but have recently become a fan of Sun‘s OpenSource release of VirtualBox as it runs on a wide variety of host systems and supports most x86 based operating systems as clients.
Cheers
I spend a LOT of time trying to optimize web applications to run and appear as fast as possible, one of the most valuable tools I have in my “bag of tricks” is the YSlow! plugin for Firefox.
It integrates in the browser and gives a near real-time scoring of the pages you visit and suggestions on how to improve them. While some of the suggestions are not practical (for example: use of a CDN) the bulk of them can be applied to your application code or server with a little bit of work.
The rules and scoring mechanisms are well documented at the following website:
The YSlow! plugin is available here:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
Happy… Faster Surfing!
After months of anticipation and three Release Candidates, the new version of Firefox is now available for download. (Due to demand, servers are still a bit slow, so just keep trying and you will eventually get it!).
Most common developer plugins were updated to support FF3 in the last week or so:
Cheers!
Okay, so this is a little odd. This does not effect the language or direction of the website, but instead is a measure to ensure proper encoding of the CSS file itself.
The browser will generally rely on the HTTP Headers to determine this value, but in cases where the server or application configuration does not, you can provide the equivalent in the file itself.
WARNING: This needs to be the first line of the .css file, before any spaces or comments.
Example:
@charset “UTF-8”;
Other common value:
@charset “ISO-8859-1”;
Reference:
http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-css-charset
Cheers!