The Cafes » Web Development

The following is a possible new chapter to be added to Refactoring HTML in the accessibility section. I’m throwing this in fairly late in the editing process, so I’d appreciate any thoughts, comments, or criticisms you might have about this. In particular, I’d appreciate any cases you can think of where autocomplete is not appropriate.

For what it’s worth, I’ve pretty well convinced myself that usernames and passwords are not such a case. That is, autocompleting usernames and passwords definitely increases accessibility and usually increases security. I don’t intend to explain why it improves security in this chapter, but if anyone wants to disagree with that, I’ll explain why in the comments.

Remove autocomplete=”off” attributes where appropriate.

<form action="/login" method="post" autocomplete="off">

<p><label>E-Mail Address: 
<input type="text" name="e1" autocomplete="off"/>
</label></p>

<p><label>Password: 
<input type="password" name="p1"  />
</label></p>

<input type="submit" title="Login" autocomplete="off"/>

</form>

<form action="/login" method="post" autocomplete="off">

<p><label>E-Mail Address: 
<input type="text" name="e1" />
</label></p>

<p><label>Password: 
<input type="password" name="p1"  />
</label></p>

<input type="submit" title="Register" />

</form>

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I’ve noticed a nasty trend in comment span here lately. So far it’s only a couple of posts, but it could become a flood. Comment spammers are copying sentences out of legitimate comments and resubmitting them with a link or two changed.

If you’re not careful, this can even fool a human inspection since the spam is thereby on topic and relevant. If it comes a couple of months after an original article was posted that received a lot of comments, it’s very easy to miss.

We may need to adjust comment filters to flag comments that copy content from previous comments. I’m not sure if any of the existing filters do that or not.

Even worse, now I’ve caught at least one apparently Polish spammer copying text out of other blog entries that reference this one and submitting that as comments here. The only hint that it’s spam comes from the site linked to. I don’t know if Bayesian analysis will catch these. Possibly a quick, automated Google plagiarism search might be in order?

WP_Cache seemed to work well for Mokka mit Schlag so now I’ve installed it here on The Cafes too. It dramatically speeds up performance by caching query responses while still allowing for live comments and editing and all that yummy fired goodness WordPress is famous for. We shall see. If anyone notes any problems on this site suddenly cropping up, please holler.
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I’ve written previously about anonymous blogging, and if that’s really what you want to do, by all means do it. However most of us are rather proud of what we write and aren’t trying to hide our identity. Nonetheless many bloggers effectively hide without realizing they’re doing it. If you do want people to know who you are, do yourself and your readers a favor: sign your posts.
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Last night I went to the New York City Java User’s Group to hear about AJAX toolkits, more specifically OpenLaszlo and GWT, both presented by their respective developers. It was an excellent idea to do these two talks on the same night since it made it really easy to compare and contrast the two approaches.

I came away with a definite preference for GWT, though it’s hard to tell if that’s because of the toolkits themselves or just because of my preference for the speakers. The OpenLaszlo presentation was classic PowerPoint bullets read off the screen, along with some reasonably cool demos. The GWT presentation was done completely in Eclipse with smaller, less impressive demos. The first GWT sample code was Hello World, as it should be, so I really felt like I could see how to get this working and understand how to use it. The OpenLaszlo sample code was too complex to follow just by glancing at the screen, though likely it did something more.
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