As developers and designers we work hard to build visually attractive, fast and easy to maintain applications. Our goals are to make sure the applications we build stick to users and keep them coming back for more. Security is not always at the forefront of our minds. No one intentionally builds insecure software but often a lack of security knowledge leads developers to build vulnerabilities into their applications. In this article we are going to examine two web security attacks, how they are executed and how to defend against them. By the end of this article you will have a few techniques i...

Once upon a time, audio on the web lived primarily in the world of third-party browser plug-ins like Flash, QuickTime and Silverlight. This was not a bad world, but it had its issues.For one, most plug-ins require the user to install them, but not all users are willing (or able) to install them. Also, many players built with these plug-ins are inaccessible, making it difficult for folks who use assistive technologies to access the audio or alternative content.Then there are the front-end design hassles like trying to get a dropdown menu to display on top of a plug-in-based player. And letâ€...

IntroductionHTML5 has been a really hot topic in web development. With the support of most modern browsers available (Safari, chrome, firefox, IE10 and mobile devices), even though the specification has not fully completed yet, but many people have already adopted it as the main technology for all the web development projects. Online giant websites such as Google, facebook, twitter and youtube, they are all built in HTML5!For me, the most exciting features of HTML5 are the canvas and the robust form capabilities. Canvas experiment can be seen all over the places (not IE, better with Chrome) bu...

Subdomain ConfigurationA subdomain configuration is very similar to a domain name configuration. The only difference is that the subdomain entry is tied to the corresponding domain name lookup. A request for the subdomain (e.g. http://content.websitegear.com) will be routed to a DNS server containing the DNS information for the parent domain (websitegear.com). Once the DNS record for the subdomain is resolved to a particular IP address, the request is sent to the web server listening on that IP address. The web server can now delegate the request to the particular website based on the subdomai...

I’ve been smashing my head against this all day – but I finally got something working consistently and reliable, so I better damn well document it. This is as good a place as any, and hopefully it will be useful to others.I needed to make an Ajax call, so I turned to my good friend XMLHttpRequest. One wrinkle was that I needed to pass in a parameter to it… so I tried:var test = "bar";req = new XMLHttpRequest();req.open("GET", myURL, true);req.foo = test;req.onreadystatechange = function() { if (this.readyState != 4) return; if (this.status == 200) { aler...

Google JS Test is a JavaScript unit testing framework that runs on the V8 JavaScript Engine, the same open source project that is responsible for Google Chrome’s super-fast JS execution speed. Google JS Test is used internally by several Google projects, and we’re pleased to announce that it has been released as an open source project.Features of Google JS Test include:Extremely fast startup and execution time, without needing to run a browser.Clean, readable output in the case of both passing and failing tests.An optional browser-based test runner that can simply be re...

Preventing directory listings can be very useful if for example, you have a directory containing important '.zip' archive files or to prevent viewing of your image directories. Alternatively it can also be useful to enable directory listings if they are not available on your server, for example if you wish to display directory listings of your important '.zip' files.To prevent directory listings, create a .htaccess file following the main instructions and guidance which includes the following text:IndexIgnore *The above lines tell the Apache Web Server to prevent directory listings of director...

If you're using an HTML form on your web site and would like to use an image submit button instead of the boring standard submit button, this HTML code is for you.In order for your form's input box and your image submit button to line up properly, you will need to place it within an HTML table. In addition, unless your image has a transparent background, you will need to set the table background color to the same color as the image background so that it will seamlessly blend together. <FORM METHOD=post ACTION="/cgi-bin/example.cgi"><TABLE BORDER="0" CELLS...