Comments on: Why Refactor HTML?

By: Flüge Los Angeles

Flüge Los Angeles — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 08:47:10 +0000

Well writen article/series of articles. I really appreciate that you are sharing your knowledge. I very dislike the missing standards, so that you need to have 6 different browsers to use the internet properly. Regarding to Walmart, I really believe that they are payed by Microsoft to only allow the IE for their website. BTW.: I´m looking for a disassembler to translate into c++, do you know something good? Thanks

By: Kent

Kent — Sat, 31 May 2008 12:05:07 +0000

Hey, I’m a published author! I’ll have to keep sending those bug reports, maybe I’ll make it into your next book

By: Theo

Theo — Sat, 31 May 2008 10:23:46 +0000

Then I take my comment back.

By: Elliotte Rusty Harold

Elliotte Rusty Harold — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:01:26 +0000

Theo,

The later chapters of the book actually go beyond pure HTML into the realm of web applications; and in those areas SQL injection, form misuse, and other issues are very relevant. Chapter 7 specifically addresses these issues.

By: Theo

Theo — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:58:53 +0000

If I have understood the theme of this book correctly I don’t think that the you-have-been-pwnd-smell is a valid smell, not in the context of refactoring HTML . Websites don’t get hacked because they have badly crafted HTML, but because the web application that generates that HTML is insecure. HTML and the code that generates it are often intertwined, but it doesn’t matter how much you refactor the HTML, the security issues (like SQL injection for example) will still be there, because they are about what data the site accepts and lack of proper checks on that data (which cannot be solved by client side validation of forms, although that helps).

@Adrian: I’m sorry but you are actually contributing to the spread of another Flash myth: that Google indexing SWF-files is actually going to change anything. SWF-files generally contain very little content (content is usually loaded in XML files once the Flash application has started running), and even those SWF-files that do contain content do not have any semantic structure that Google can use to make sense of the file, it’s more or less equivalent to running the “strings” command on a desktop application, you get a lot of text, but you can’t make any sense of it. Moreover, any web application that requires the user to log in is even more opaque to Google. That Google indexes web applications is as useful as Google Desktop indexing desktop applications. I’m not saying that it doesn’t, just that it doesn’t help.

Thanks for an interesting read, I will dive right in to the next post now.

By: Bahador

Bahador — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:21:34 +0000

Great read!
Thanks!
About browser compatibility; I find it really hard to justify testing against Opera (and even Safari) in my company; there’s just a lot of people that say it’s a waste of time.

By: Asbjørn Ulsberg

Asbjørn Ulsberg — Thu, 29 May 2008 10:31:11 +0000

Excellent run-through! I agree on all points and don’t have much to add, because the list is already so extensive. Well done!

By: Adrian

Adrian — Thu, 29 May 2008 08:15:23 +0000

Great series of articles, I’m nodding in more or less total agreement, and looking forward to the next!

I’d just like to note Flash has been indexable by Google et al for a while now. With the coming mass adoption of RIA via Flex I think some Flash myths need to be debunked, Flash being non indexable being one of them.

By: Mark A Hershberger

Mark A Hershberger — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:57:11 +0000

I hope he doesn’t. Unicode > entities.

By: jonathan peterson

jonathan peterson — Wed, 28 May 2008 16:28:31 +0000