From ian at hixie.ch Sun Jun 1 03:49:15 2008 From: ian at hixie.ch (Ian Hickson) Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2008 10:49:15 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [whatwg] scripts that remove focus from links during document navigation In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, 20 Sep 2006, Hallvord R M Steen wrote: > > Opera has a serious usability problem for keyboard- and device-users > when pages do the following: > > > > This coding is very common because IE adds a small outline border to > focused links. Authors who do not like this will blur links when they > are activated to avoid this cosmetic issue. (Mea culpa: I've done > exactly this myself in sites I coded as a newbie, for that very reason.) > > In Opera, when keyboard navigation hits this link, focus is removed. > Thus the link can not be activated from the keyboard and navigation may > have to start from the top of the document again. > > We need some prose in a spec that allows a user agent to ignore blur() > for accessibility reasons. Done in HTML5, which seems to be the only spec that actually defines blur() in any sort of useful detail now. :-) -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' From hsivonen at iki.fi Sun Jun 1 06:45:26 2008 From: hsivonen at iki.fi (Henri Sivonen) Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2008 16:45:26 +0300 Subject: [whatwg] Is EBCDIC support needed for not breaking the Web? Message-ID: <64E4A9A2-86F2-4BD9-B2FA-E409DC7F183B@iki.fi> The HTML5 draft says that authors should not use EBCDIC-based encodings. This is more lax than saying that authors must not use and user agents must not support CESU-8, UTF-7, BOCU-1 and SCSU. In general, now that UTF-8 exists and is ubiquitously supported, proliferation of encodings is costly and doesn't expand that the expressiveness of HTML which is parsed into a Unicode DOM anyway. Moreover, encodings that are not ASCII supersets are potential security risks since the string " I can guarantee you that a few hours work I have a very good script that does this very well. > 4. Please explain why you consider network efficiency for legacy user > agents essential. I believe that the correlation between efficiency and > compatibility is negative in general. It is not the network efficiency for the user agens I am worried about - it is the server side of things that will be the problem. If the server has to do handle 20 separate dynamic requests just to display a single page view then that is unacceptable - and the method will never be used by bigger websites simply because it is not scalable. In fact, it would have already been done if it was a viable option. Please consider my answer to your question number two as well. > If that causes server overload, the > server can discriminate content depending on the user agent; this is a > temporary solution to an edge case and it should probably be acceptable. That is unacceptable. Major websites must accommodate at least 98 % of its user base at any time, and to promote user agent checking on the server side is a major issue for me, and most likely for most other web developers that work on a per project basis. It would require me to review already launched sites regularly and is hardly efficient use of my labour. > Besides, a blog page with 60 comments on it is rather hard to render and > read so you should probably consider other display options in this case. I am extremely against making assumptions such as "a blog page with 60 comments on is rather hard to read" so it will never be a problem. I prefer scrolling before clicking "next page" any time. If there is a choice to display 100 comments instead of 10 then I select 100 comments. Also user generated content might be single line comments, or even just a list of single words. > 5. I am not sure why IFRAME content must be HTTP-secured if the containing > page is. The specification does not impose such a restriction AFAIK. And, > if you need to go secure, do not allow scribbling in the first place, right? 1. An insecure iframe in a secure document will give you security warnings from the browser (There are insecure elements on this page, do you want to display them?). 2. Mixing secure and insecure communications makes having the secure channel pointless. 3. It is extremely dangerous to assume that nobody in the future will ever need to have secure communications with user generated content. Best regards, Frode B?rli - Seria.no From lachlan.hunt at lachy.id.au Tue Jun 17 13:11:32 2008 From: lachlan.hunt at lachy.id.au (Lachlan Hunt) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:11:32 +0200 Subject: [whatwg] Sandboxing to accommodate user generated content. In-Reply-To: <31fb000f0806170605o4bcbe2b9nb4ebd620d18ed069@mail.gmail.com> References: <31fb000f0806162106i52dd2cefsfdfa014c12094746@mail.gmail.com> <31fb000f0806162109h8cc9a72w3db047749a7764a1@mail.gmail.com> <31fb000f0806170605o4bcbe2b9nb4ebd620d18ed069@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <48581A74.4030707@lachy.id.au> Frode B?rli wrote: > I have been reading up on past discussions on sandboxing content, and > I feel that it is generally agreed on that there should be some > mechanism for marking content as "user generated". The discussion > mainly appears to be focused on implementation. Please read my > implementation notes at the end of this message on how we can include > this function safely for both HTML 4 and HTML 5 browsers, and still > allow HTML 4 browsers to function properly. > > My main arguments for having this feature (in one form or another) in > the browser is: > > - It is future proof. Changes to browsers (for example adding > expression support to css) will never again require old sanitizers to > be updated. If the sanitiser uses a whitelist based approach that forbids everything by default, and then only allows known elements and attributes; and in the case of the style attribute, known properties and values that are safe, then that would also be the case. > - It does not require much skill and effort from the web developer to > safely sanitize user content. > - Security bugs are fixed by browser vendors, and not by each web developer. Note that sandboxing doesn't entirely remove the need for sanitising user generated content on the server, it's just an extra line of defence in case something slips through. > The suggested solution of using an attribute on an