Web Info & Tutorials

February 16th, 2007

W3C WIDGETS 1.0 REQUIREMENTS

Marcos Caceres is the editor of the Widgets 1.0 Requirements from the W3C (mentioned previously).

Following the publication of the W3C Widgets 1.0 standard the W3C’s WAF working group has republished a requirements document for Widgets 1.0. The new document attempts to embrace the movement towards making widget engines available on mobile devices and the opportunities that opens up.

We asked Marcos what this is all about:

As it’s a requirements document, it is really an open call to the community to give us feedback on what they would want to see in the final spec. In particular, we are looking for suggestions on what parts of the Widget APIs should be standardised.

Personally speaking, I guess cool things include standardising how services on a device are accessed. Services include things like the camera, SMS, voice, and location information to make widgets which are more personable and location-aware. Another aspect that we are looking at is what kind of security model we put around widgets; the key being to have a model that allows developers the flexibility to do interesting things like mash-ups but not to be overly restrictive and not to put both the user and the device at risk.

Let the community know your thoughts.

February 16th, 2007

CRAWLING AJAX APPLICATIONS

Shreeraj Shah has published a paper on Crawling Ajax-driven Web 2.0 Applications.

Crawling web applications is one of the key phases of automated web application scanning. The objective of crawling is to collect all possible resources from the server in order to automate vulnerability detection on each of these resources. A resource that is overlooked during this discovery phase can mean a failure to detect some vulnerabilities.

The introduction of Ajax throws up new challenges for the crawling engine. New ways of handling the crawling process are required as a result of these challenges. The objective of this paper is to use a practical approach to address this issue using rbNarcissus, Watir and Ruby .

It really shows how powerful tools like Watir are.

February 16th, 2007

AJAX EXPERIENCE PRESENTATIONS: BRENDAN EICH, CHRIS WILSON, KEVIN HACKMAN

The folks at Scribe Media have started to roll out video that they took at the last Ajax Experience:

More should be published shortly.

The Ajax Experience Videos

February 16th, 2007

UNDERSTANDING AND SOLVING THE JAVASCRIPT/CSS ENTANGLEMENT PHENOMENON

Ara Pehlivanian talked most the graceful humiliation myth awhile back, and since then has become up with a ultimate resolution to his problem.

The key is surround CSS styles aimed at JS enabled browsers that overwrite the initial land in the writing that does the correct abstract for someone who isn’t reaching in via a JavaScript enabled surround (e.g. accessible).

Here is an example of a pane that drops downbound noesis in JS mode, and shows it without thusly not interference that noesis from non-JS view.

The CSS

Brand CSS for items that you poverty to override via hasJS classnames.

CSS:

  1.  
  2. body.hasJS {
  3.         background-color: #0f0;
  4. }
  5.                
  6. body {
  7.         background: #f00;
  8. }
  9.  

JavaScript

Turn on that CSS via JavaScript (addClassName):

HTML:

  1.  
  2. <script type=“text/javascript”>document.body.className += "hasJS"</script>
  3. <div class=“window”>
  4.         <div class=“head”>
  5.                 <h1 id=“toggle”>This is a pane head</h1>
  6.         </div>
  7.         <div class=“content” id=“toggleContent”>
  8.                 <p>This is the windows contents.</p>
  9.                 <p>And whatever more content…</p>
  10.         </div>
  11. </div>
  12.  

Do you ingest these tactics?