HTML cleartype meta tag?

This tag allows for activation of ClearType in Mobile IE for smoothing fonts.


<!--[if IEMobile]><meta http-equiv="cleartype" content="on" /><![endif]-->

NOTE: Future use of this approach is questionable, as MSIE10 dropped support of conditional comments, and HTML5 validators (in general) do not “like” the http-equiv values as they are not standardized

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Browser performance impact of charset/codepage assignment

Most developers (myself included) are often unaware of the performance impact of the Content-Type / charset of a web page. Ideally you should set this as an HTTP Header vs. using META http-equiv. It’s often though that this only helps with the transport and display of data, however, the browser also makes use of it when parsing CSS & JS assets. Tags related to those provide an optional ‘charset‘ attribute should they ever need to vary from your content.

General guidance is to set this at the very top of the <head> before <title>; and within the first 1024 bytes, though there are reports that Firefox will look at the first 2048 bytes of the page for this META information.

Not doing so may cause the browser to do a codepage restart to re-parse assets that were interpreted in the potentially incorrect codepage.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

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X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff

To prevent XSS/CSRF exploits in MSIE8 and newer, it’s often best to close as many attack vectors as possible. An easy one to implement is an HTTP Header to prevent MSIE from “sniffing” the content to change it when incorrect.

Example: we would not want an HTML page intentionally served with ‘text/plain’ to be rendered as HTML.


X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Content-Type: text/plain

This could be added programatically to pages in your application, via a servlet or servlet filter or added to the httpd.conf file.

Apache2 example: httpd.conf

<IfModule headers_module>
Header set X-Content-Type-Options nosniff
</IfModule>

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JavaScript language attribute

Occasionally I’ve stumbled upon legacy javascript code that is used to determine javascript support by the visiting users. This often proves comical, because they are many times wasting time making checks for some “VERY OLD” browsers indeed! Here’s a rundown of the versions of javascript as well as their release dates and some common browser versions that implemented them.

  • JavaScript 1.0 (March 1996) = Navigator 2.0 / MSIE 3.0
  • JavaScript 1.1 (August 1996) = Navigator 3.0
  • JavaScript 1.2 (June 1997) = Navigator 4.0-4.05
  • JavaScript 1.3 (October 1998) = Navigator 4.06-4.7x / MSIE 4.0
  • JavaScript 1.4 = Netscape Server
  • JavaScript 1.5 (November 2000) = Navigator 6.0 / Firefox 1.0 / MSIE 5.5 – 8.0 / Safari 3.0-5 / Chrome 1.0-10.x / Opera 6.0
  • JavaScript 1.6 (November 2005) = Firefox 1.5
  • JavaScript 1.7 (October 2006) = Firefox 2.0
  • JavaScript 1.8 (June 2008) = Firefox 3.0 / Opera 11.50
  • JavaScript 1.8.1 = Firefox 3.5
  • JavaScript 1.8.2 (June 2009) = Firefox 3.6
  • JavaScript 1.8.5 (July 2010) = Firefox 4.0 / MSIE 9.0 / Opera 11.60

The language attribute has long been deprecated and should generally be avoided, it’s original purpose was to support other scripting languages, notably VBScript, or particular JavaScript versions. Modern conventions rely on specifying the MIME type instead via the ‘type’ attribute.

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"> is now <script type="text/javascript">

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript1.1"> is now <script type="text/javascript1.1">

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="VBScript"> is now <script type="text/vbscript">

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="TCL"> is now <script type="text/tcl">

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