web development

html

HTML Validation: Does It Matter?

The web is, to put it charitably, a rather forgiving place. You can feed web browsers almost any sort of HTML markup or JavaScript code and they'll gamely try to make sense of what you've provided, and render it the best they can. In comparison, most

By Jeff Atwood ·
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web development

The Two Types of Browser Zoom

From the dawn of the web – at least since Netscape Navigator 4.x – it has been possible to resize the text on a web page. This is typically done through the View menu. This was fine in the early, primitive days of the web, when page layouts were simple and

By Jeff Atwood ·
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programming languages

Obscenity Filters: Bad Idea, or Incredibly Intercoursing Bad Idea?

I'm not a huge fan of The Daily WTF for reasons I've previously outlined. There is, however, the occasional gem – such as this one posted by ezrec: Browsing through a web archive of some old computer club conversations, I ran across this sentence: "Apple made

By Jeff Atwood ·
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security

Preventing CSRF and XSRF Attacks

In Cross-Site Request Forgeries and You I urged developers to take a close look at possible CSRF / XSRF vulnerabilities on their own websites. They're the worst kind of vulnerability -- very easy to exploit by attackers, yet not so intuitively easy to understand for software developers, at least

By Jeff Atwood ·
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security

Cross-Site Request Forgeries and You

As the web becomes more and more pervasive, so do web-based security vulnerabilities. I talked a little bit about the most common web vulnerability, cross-site scripting, in Protecting Your Cookies: HttpOnly. Although XSS is incredibly dangerous, it's a fairly straightforward exploit to understand. Do not allow users to

By Jeff Atwood ·
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security

Protecting Your Cookies: HttpOnly

So I have this friend. I've told him time and time again how dangerous XSS vulnerabilities are, and how XSS is now the most common of all publicly reported security vulnerabilities -- dwarfing old standards like buffer overruns and SQL injection. But will he listen? No. He'

By Jeff Atwood ·
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javascript

Secrets of the JavaScript Ninjas

One of the early technology decisions we made on Stack Overflow was to go with a fairly JavaScript intensive site. Like many programmers, I've been historically ambivalent about JavaScript: * The Power of "View Source" * The Day Performance Didn't Matter Any More * JavaScript and HTML:

By Jeff Atwood ·
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asp.net mvc

Web Development as Tag Soup

As we work with ASP.NET MVC on Stack Overflow, I find myself violently thrust back into the bad old days of tag soup that I remember from my tenure as a classic ASP developer in the late 90's. If you're not careful bordering on manically

By Jeff Atwood ·
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php

Dealing With Bad Apples

Robert Miesen sent in this story of a project pathology: I was part of a team writing an web-based job application and screening system (a job kiosk the customer called it) and my team and our customer signed on to implementing this job kiosk using Windows, Apache, PHP5, and the

By Jeff Atwood ·
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web development

Smart Enough Not To Build This Website

I may not be smart enough to join Mensa [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensa_International], but I am smart enough not to build websites like the American Mensa website. [https://www.us.mensa.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Calendar&Template=Security/NoPassword.cfm] Do you see the mistake?

By Jeff Atwood ·
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web development

The Great Dub-Dub-Dub Debate

Pop quiz, hotshot. Which one is the superior Uniform Resource Locator? www.fakeplasticrock.com or fakeplasticrock.com This is one of those intractable problems. Global wars have been fought over so much less. In hacker circles, this is sometimes referred to as a bikeshed discussion. That said, I do have

By Jeff Atwood ·
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software development

Introducing Stackoverflow.com

A little over a month ago, I announced that I was quitting my job. But there was also something else I didn't fully announce. But I refuse to become a full-time blogger. I think that's a cop-out. If I look at the people I respect most

By Jeff Atwood ·
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