Gadgetopia

PNG is an awesome image format, primarily useful for its ability to support 8-bit transparency (that is, an alpha channel where there's a continuum from opaque to transparent, instead of the simple on/off transparency of GIF). So what's been holding you back from using it? IE for Windows, mostly, which ...

Opera tries to force IE into W3C compliance with EU complaint; Firefox s success may work against it: Opera has filed a complaint with the EU trying to get a ruling that forces IE into W3C compliance. Opera wants the EC to hold Microsoft s feet to the fire when it comes ...

Are you paying someone to make web pages? By now I'm sure that everyone is sick of hearing web people wail and moan about how much they hate IE. But the sad truth is that aside from giving your security guy nightmares, and serving as the source of a lot ...

New, sneaky, evil PayPal spoof: Here's a good example of an email scam made possible by the IE URL spoofing hole that remains unpatched.

Spoofing for Dummies: Don Park has set up a demo of the new spoofing exploit that IE is exhibiting. Press the button the result is quite depressing.

Fight the power: I consider it my civic duty to pass this on. Don't let the copyright office REQUIRE IE. Take a break from email and Web surfing to send a real, paper letter (with five copies) to the U.S. Copyright office and tell them that REQUIRING use of IE ...

In a surprise twist, a security flaw has been found in IE's impenetrable armor that allows a trojan to install its payload and monitor for passwords sent over https connections. Your account number? Now it's everyone's account number! Thanks for sharing. A "Browser Helper Object" is a DLL that allows ...

Multiple IE's in Windows: Here's a tutorial on how to run multiple versions of IE on the same machine. "I, like so many other's, have struggled with ways to test designs, css, etc. in multiple versions of Internet Explorer. Usually the only solutions were to have multiple OS's installed on ...

Ad Hoc Meeting on US Patent 5,838,906: Microsoft recently lost a patent dispute and is making changes to IE as a result (this, after they announced IE was frozen). The W3C posted this notice, with an ominous warning: "... Microsoft has indicated to W3C that they will very soon be ...

Ars Technica has an interesting blog roundup article this morning with quotes from a number of MS employees who are questioning the wisdom of keeping IE around without improving it. The saga of Internet Explorer, the piece of software that once brought the Department of Justice to the brink of ...

ieSpell - Spell Checker add-on for Internet Explorer: "ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage. ... The program installs as a new button in the IE toolbar (as well as a new menu item under 'Tools') after filling in ...

Internet Explorer consigned to the Trash: There will not be another version of IE for the Mac: "[Microsoft] says that the decision has been made to make way for Apple's own Safari browser. 'Some of the key customer requests for web browsing on the Mac require close development between the ...

Faced with yet another round of IE exploits, people are starting to move to other browsers. For the first time ever, IE has lost market share, down 1% in the past month. "It's the first time that we've seen a sustained trend downward for them," said Geoff Johnston, an analyst ...

Windows XP Service Pack 2: Use the Internet Explorer Information Bar: Microsoft did a good job with the latest addition to IE: the Information Bar. Internet Explorer now displays an Information Bar (just below the address bar) where you can see information about downloads, blocked pop-up windows, potential security risks, ...

Information for Developers about Changes to Internet Explorer: The Eolas patent decision has spawned the dreaded IE update. Changes will need to be made, especially if your sites use Flash. "Developers who build ActiveX controls, Web developers who use ActiveX and Java Applets on their Web sites, and developers who ...

Security risks swell for Microsoft's Explorer: From the Gee, That's Obvious Department. Using Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser to surf the Internet has become a marked risk even with the latest security patches installed. That's the upshot of the discovery of yet another Internet Explorer security hole being exploited ...

New on MSDN: IEBlog. The official blog of the Internet Explorer product team. As it turns out, there is an Internet Explorer product team. And they're working on IE 7. Go figure. Their take on IE? I Love This Browser! I hopefully got your attention with the title of my ...

Redirection with Smoke And ... Smoking?: Today's DailyWTF is an absolute gem, high-lighting the fact that 10% - 20% of Web surfers cannot access the Web site of the company at #20 on the Fortune 500. Brilliant.

Rob showed me this list of things Mozilla does that IE doesn't. Some of the features I've come to love... #1. Tabbed Browsing #4. Link Toolbar: I've written about this before. #34. Can fill in complete forms automatically: Do you know how much faster this lets you test? It's a ...

IE2Mozilla: Here's a hack to make all Microsoft programs (including IE) render HTML using the Gecko rendering engine instead of the IE engine.

Enable DesignMode: I tried this, and it worked great. Someone please tell me there's something like this for Firefox. Enable DesignMode is an extension for Internet Explorer that adds a context menu option that enables Design Mode. Design mode lets you edit the web page in the active window. No ...

Wide-body CSS | silverorange labs: Notes on the "min-width" CSS attribute that IE doesn't support. It would come in handy, along with its companion max-width that [sigh] IE doesn't support either. "The advent of table-free pure CSS layouts has been great for those browsing with non-PC environments (handhelds, ...

Internet Explorer to stomp pop-ups: Once again, Microsoft is on the cutting edge of software improvements. "Microsoft plans to add pop-up blocking features to Internet Explorer next year as part of its Service Pack 2 update for Windows XP, a move that would go far toward stamping out the Web ...

Schneier on Security: Internet Explorer Sucks: Security God Bruce Schneier tells it like it is. MSIE was 98% unsafe. There were only 7 days in 2004 without an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. Firefox was 15% unsafe. There were 56 days with an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. 30 of ...

Eolas files motion to enjoin IE: They want Microsoft to stop distribute any version of IE prior to the new one with the changes. Eolas, the sole licensee and sublicensor of a browser plug-in patent owned by the University of California, on Monday asked the U.S. District Court in Chicago ...

Developers gripe about IE standards inaction: Now that Microsoft has abandoned Internet Explorer, it looks like that browser's bugs are here to stay. "Web developers want to light a fire under Microsoft to get better standards support in the company's Internet Explorer browser, but they can't seem to spark a ...

Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (832894): Tell me, why is this a good idea? Hasn't this been a standard for a lo-o-o-ong time now? The update removes support for handling user names and passwords in HTTP and HTTP with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or HTTPS URLs in Microsoft Internet ...

Google complains about Microsoft search engine: This argument is a tough sell. The New York Times reports that Microsoft's new Internet browser includes a search box in the upper-right corner that is typically set up to send users to Microsoft's MSN search service. Google contends that this puts Microsoft in ...

Internet Explorer Takes Another Market-Share Hit: It's small, sure, but it's perceptible. Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer lost nearly a percentage point in market share in the past seven weeks and is nearing a loss of 3 percentage points since its decline first began in early June, [...] Internet Explorer dropped ...

Internet Explorer: Customize the Image Toolbar: You know that little toolbar that appears in Internet Explorer when you hover over an image it lets you save the image or email it or whatever. Did you know you can turn this off in HTML? Or ...

Microsoft tags IE 7 'high priority' update: This strikes me as a really bad idea. Really bad. Microsoft plans to automatically push Internet Explorer 7 to Windows XP users when the browser update is ready later this year. IE 7 will be delivered in the fourth quarter as a "high ...

SaveTheDevelopers.org :: Making The Web A Better Place: Dear God, please save us. Say no to IE 6! Our current campaign focuses on assisting users in upgrading their Internet Explorer 6 web browser. This campaign will result in former IE 6 users having a more enjoyable experience on the web ...

The All-Music Guide has long had a pretty irritating web site. The design rendered poorly in non-IE browsers, almost all of the links were javascript-driven for no apparent reason, etc. So, when they recently redesigned, you'd expect them to fix these problems, right? No such luck. The new design not ...

ongoing - The Door Is Ajar: Tim Bray is anti-Microsoft and anti-Internet Explorer. One good point he makes here is this: "...even though his customers are in IE-land, he keeps up on Mozilla not only because he likes it but because Mozilla may outpace IE in the corporate world: most ...

.NET Will Rock Your World: Don Park is a smart guy, and I tend to take his predictions seriously. "People will get the clue when .NET 2.0 is released and they will be rocked when .NET 3.0 is unleashed. People talk about IE standing still and emergence of rich clients ...

CSS3 module: Multi-column layout: CSS3 has great column support, it looks like. Consider these rules: column-width column-count columns column-gap column-rule-color column-rule-style' column-rule-width column-rule The coolness of this requires me to end this post only one way: IE sucks. To the IE team -- congratulations on getting to CSS2 compliance with ...

Mint: Requirements: Here's the requirements page for Mint. It's kinda nice to see IE not supported. In order to view Mint you should be using a modern browser with support for transparent PNGs, modern DOM scripting (including XMLHTTPRequest) with competency in CSS 2. Safari or Firefox, both free, are highly ...

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 Details Begin to Leak: It stuns me that of all the things Microsoft is thinking about putting into IE7, improved CSS support is not one of them. Partner sources say Microsoft is wavering on the extent to which it plans to support CSS2 with IE 7.0. ...

About Dynamic Properties: Ever heard of IE's CSS "expression" property? It allows you to set a CSS property not to a constant, but to the result of a JavaScript expression. Like this: p{width:expression(400 + "px");} What this lets you do, according to this really good article, is make IE emulate ...

dean.edwards.name/IE7/: This guy made an "IE7" patch for Internet Explorer that uses JavaScript to force IE to honor CSS features like min-width, :first-child, [attr=value], etc. Here's the good news: it works. It comes with a series of test pages that prove it's doing what it should be doing imagine, ...

I was in the middle of writing my love letter to IE when a SharpReader update popped up. IE7 is on the way. Joy. Chief Software Architect Bill Gates announced plans to launch a test version of Internet Explorer 7.0 this summer. The company had said that it would not ...

Why I don't recommend Firefox: Adam doesn't think that Firefox is ready to be unleashed on all users just yet. He makes some good points. Firefox right now is very good for an experienced net user, but is not at all ready for the average person. If you plan on ...

About Conditional Comments: A handy but pretty obscure feature of Internet Explorer. A special comment format lets only IE see certain HTML / CSS code. So make that Web page look good in Mozilla and Opera, then hide the code necessary for IE in these comments. Conditional comments have certain ...

Microsoft removes ActiveX activation warning from IE: The Eolas debacle has apparently ended. Microsoft paid them off and hopes to update all IE versions by April 2008. For an undisclosed sum, the software maker has licensed the patented technology in question from Eolas, allowing it to modify IE6 and 7 ...

ZDNet states that the latest variants of the Bagle worm include the original assembler source code of the virus as an attachment to the emails it sends. Security experts worry that this will produce a lot more variants, and make it harder to prosecute the author. "On Friday, the perfect ...

VML editor: Take a look at this in IE 5+. I'm afraid to view the source. Via Pirillo.

I saw a handy little favelet roll across the del.icio.us feed today: By far the most complicated favelet I've attempted, this one fails in MacIE, but works fine in Camino/Chimera & Mozilla, so it'll presumably be okay in other Gecko-based browsers. [...] It shows the mouse's current position in the ...

LitePC: IEradicator - the Internet Explorer Hitman!: This is perhaps a little extreme. And given the dynamic loading that Windows apps generally do, I wonder if you're going to wipe out some DLL that something else needs at some point? IEradicator is a tiny, script that uses the Windows setup ...

IE, Flash, and patents: here comes trouble: Zeldman highlights a big problem with this Eolas patent ruling. Technically, rich media is now no longer allow to play automatically in the browser window. This means that Flash movies cannot start without user intervention. "Besides paying over half a billion dollars to ...

IE7 CSS Updates: Mezzoblue has an update of the changes in IE7. Sadly, improved CSS support is pretty lacking. Other than that? After running through Position Is Everything's "Explorer Exposed" omnibus, it seems to me that the list of outstanding IE bugs remains long. Line-height bug? Not fixed. Border chaos? ...

Update: See the comments. I have found a way around this in both IE and Mozilla. I thought about deleting the post, but if taken with the comments, it's still a pretty good tutorial of how to do this. Another Update: One of our commentors points out that Mozilla 1.7 ...

Link Markers: CSS Generated Content: A good example of something you can do using Mozilla and Opera, but not IE. Makes me want to use XML/XSL instead of HTML.

Are the Browser Wars Back? - How Mozilla's Firefox trumps Internet Explorer: This is a good article from Slate that rings true Mozilla and Firefox are surging in the market right now. More and more, people are switching. You've probably been told to dump Internet Explorer for a Mozilla ...

So, has anybody else installed the newest Flash plugin and now can't view any flash sites with Firefox anymore? How do I roll this back one version? I really hate going back to IE just to view flash sites.

I've been looking for a small project to test out the Rails framework, so I've decided to combine that with exploring ways to reduce the time and complexity involved in creating a blog entry. This will be an ongoing series of articles, but this is a low-priority project, so each ...

Firefox's biggest obstacle is lazy programming: Truer words have rarely been spoken. The biggest obstacle facing widespread adoption of the Firefox browser is lazy programming not from the Mozilla Foundation but from corporates that have not tested their applications with anything but IE.

I Wanna Devise A Virus: Funny. Devious. Illegal. Isn't it about time someone wrote a web standards virus? It would uninstall older browsers and replace them with Firefox or worse case, IE 6. Maybe even be so nice as to move the victims bookmarks/favorites and homepage over to the ...

Here's a link to a page at Google that appears to be written in XUL Mozilla's XML User Interface Language, designed for building client-type interfaces over the Web. (That link won't do anything in IE.) No one knows quite where this page came from or what it's doing.

Forrester: Greasemonkey Primes Firefox For Embarrassment: Forrester has released a report that says Greasemonkey is a good reason to ditch plans for corporate Firefox rollouts. [...] IT managers beware: Greasemonkey will cause you nothing but headaches, and may even be a good reason to delay that Firefox pilot you're planning. ...

Wired News: Mozilla Wants to Rumble With IE "Microsoft's Internet Explorer might have trounced the likes of Netscape Navigator, but the folks at Mozilla.org insist the browser wars aren't over. ... That was the message coming from Mozilla.org's offices in Mountain View, California, on Tuesday when it announced it would ...

Phasing out support for IE 6 across all 37signals products on August 15, 2008: This is so necessary. Someone had to step up and kick the snowball off the hill. On August 15th, 2008 we will begin phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6 across all 37signals products. In order ...

Here's a crazy little tidbit that you should probably never use on a normal web page: Thanks to RFC 2397, some browsers include the 'data:' url type, which lets you embed data resources right in your page. For instance, the image attached to this post looks like this: Mozilla folks ...

Another one for the web developer toolkit: MOZiE will simultaneously display the same page using both IE and Mozilla. A great way to shed some of your CSS woes. MOZiE is an extremely light-weight, free Windows application that allows web designers the ability to compare page rendering in Mozilla and ...

Microsoft Live aims to kill off Skype: Yeah, good luck with that. (Oh, those are so famous last words, aren't they? Someone said that about IE back in 1997, I'm sure...) Microsoft today launches its final version of Windows Live Messenger software, as it lines up to challenge VoIP telephonist ...

Rich-Text Editing in Mozilla 1.3: Very cool. Along with NTLM (coming in 1.4), this is one more thing to which IE can no longer lay sole claim: "Mozilla 1.3 introduces an implementation of Microsoft Internet Explorer's designMode feature. The rich-text editing support in Mozilla 1.3 supports the designMode feature which ...

Microsoft to pay AOL $750 million | CNET News.com: This is a bit of a downer because I thought AOL was edging closer to using Mozilla or another Gecko-based browser as their default. Seven more years on IE? That alone was probably worth the money to Microsoft. "As part of ...

iRider Web Browser: Here's a new Web browser wait, before you ask "Why do we need another one?", watch this demo movie all the way to the end (about five minutes). I was quite impressed with some of the usability features in this one. Some of the things it ...

Get Firefox to do NTLM: This is very cool. Why wasn't this documented earlier? SharePoint pages look and work fine in Firefox, but I was having to reauthenticate on every single page, which really hindered my enjoyment of the experience. I finally figured out how to get Firefox to do ...

DevEdit is a Browser Based WYSIWYG Online HTML Editor...: DevEdit has got to be one of the most impressive, feature-rich, Web-based, WYSIWYG HTML editors on the market. At first glance, I thought this was just another basic rendition of the browser control within IE. Looking deeper though, I saw it's ...

Convea - Open Source Business Application Platform: This is a pretty stunning piece of work. It's super-Outlook in a browser. IE 5.5+ only. Try the demo. If you're ever used Oddpost, you'll be just as impressed with Convea. Using astounding client-side programming, they have utterly and completely replictaed a client-side ...

Bindows Home: If you like Convea or Oddpost, you'll love Bindows. It's a DHTML API that allows you to write Web-based apps that look and feel just like client-side installed apps. The samples page is amazing, but don't visit in anything but IE 6. "Bindows is a Graphical User Interface ...

Google Blatantly Copies Yahoo!?: While I know that Jeremy is not a huge Google fan to start with, I have to agree with him that this is insanely blatant. So blatant, in fact, that I'm left thinking there's more to the story. Back when IE7 launched, Yahoo! created a customized ...

Learn to Create Dynamic Web Pages in Less Than an Hour: Neat little Flash demo on using ColdFusion Components in DreamWeaver MX. It shows the tight integration resulting from the Macromedia and Allaire merger a couple years back. Another note: initially, I thought the article was lame because it was ...

20 Things They Don't Want You to Know: This is just one page in an excellent article from PC World (found via Slashdot) that has links to multiple resources for finding passwords that you've forgotten. Finding license keys for software you currently have installed Revealing saved passwords in IE that ...

Icons: It's still orange: IE7 is going to use the Firefox icon for RSS. This may seem like a small thing, but was when the last time Microsoft (and the IE group in particular) ever said, "Hey, there's a good standard already out there. Let's embrace it." I'm frankly amazed ...

Download details: Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar Beta: Hadn't seen this before, but I'm game for anything that makes developing for IE suck less. Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page. [...] Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques. ...

Eolas says it would settle over IE 'In response to newly revealed details of Microsoft's potential plans to redesign its browser, Eolas founder Mike Doyle urged the software giant to leave Internet Explorer alone and pay his company a license fee instead." Further down in this article, it mentions that ...

Mozilla Firebird Primer for Windows Users: A great article that explains why Firebird is a better browser than Internet Explorer. However, at one point, the author says this: I definitely do not recommend using Firebird for any actual work, since it's still in pre-release, and stability is obviously not guaranteed. ...

A (CSS) Horse of a Different Color: A quick look at the upcoming opacity features in CSS3. "The draft CSS3 color module takes this a step further, adding an alpha channel to the RGB value, effectively allowing you to change the opacity of an object. This additional alpha value takes ...

ajax: a new approach to web applications: Adaptive Path sticks a name on the current crop of XMLHttpRequest-enabled apps. An Ajax application eliminates the start-stop-start-stop nature of interaction on the Web by introducing an intermediary an Ajax engine between the user and the server. It seems like adding ...

BW Online | Apple's Real Worry Isn't the Loss of IE: Good article on the future of the Mac and how it's tied in with Microsoft. "...far more daunting is the prospect of Microsoft abandoning the Mac version of its popular Office software. That's because Apple hasn't yet shown it ...

It's apparently been around for a while, but I just ran across elgooG today. 1.1. Why is this backwards? [...] It's a Google mirror. A common practice for busy websites is to create a mirror site, which is an exact replica of the original site but on a different server. ...

Is the Firefox honeymoon over?: Apparently, the number of viruses and exploits coming out for Firefox is more than for IE lately. As you can see, the facade that Firefox is the cure to the Internet Explorer security blues is quickly fading. It just goes to prove that any popular ...

If you haven't upgraded to Firefox 1.5, then you may still be dealing with those horrible dialog boxes when there's an HTTP or DNS error. The new version has nicely formatted standard pages, like the sample above. I always hated those dialogs, because when a domain wasn't found or something, ...

I found a peach of a tool today it was exactly what I was looking for at exactly the right time. We have a central database at my company, and the guys have been bugging me to work up some enhanced printing for it. They want to be able ...

HTML Tip: Sorting With The OPTGROUP Element: I found a tag today that I had never heard of before. OPTGROUP allows you to have an option in a dropdown that isn't selectable, is seperately formattable via CSS, and that other options are indented under. Until recently, the OPTGROUP element belonged ...

The Mozilla Foundation has cranked out new versions of three major apps today. The Mozilla Suite goes to 1.5, with enhancements to Composer, a new spellchecker, and stability enhancements. The world's greatest browser (if you ask me), FireBird, goes to version 0.7 and gets enhanced preferences, alternate stylesheets features, and ...

Boycott Microsoft Search!: I guess I don't see the point. "Microsoft is building a Web search engine, and they intend for it to become the industry standard. Given Microsoft's track record during the browser wars, there is every reason to believe the company will again use its monopoly power to ...

Party Like It's 1996!: Apple has gone all Microsoft on us, creating new Safari-only HTML markup willy-nilly. Even more troubling is the opening phrase: "Another extension we made to HTML is..." I'd be really happy if someone explained to me how this is different from what Netscape and Microsoft did ...

Is Opera in Microsoft's future?: Dvorak says Microsoft should dump IE altogether and buy Opera lock, stock, and barrel. This week Microsoft announced that it wouldn't upgrade the Internet Explorer for the Macintosh, leaving that market segment to apparently languish and gravitate towards the Safari browser and Firefox. Microsoft does ...

I'm curious to the relationship between screen resolution and actual viewable browser area (see this post). I need your help. I wrote a quick page that will print out the two for you (it should work, anyway -- I wrote it in 30 seconds and tested it for about that ...

I'm curious these days about actual browser saturation statistics. Everyone has a different story. Boing Boing reported this week that almost half of their visitors are coming in on a Mozilla-based browser. OneStat.com is reporting IE has dipped under 90% for the first time in many, many years. WebSideStory says ...

Play, Learn, and Surf...with Kids.us!: Good for them. Just wait for the wave of IE plug-ins that will lock the browser down to this domain only. "Finally, there's an Internet domain that parents and children can trust for educational and appropriate online fun: kids.us! All content on affiliated sites is ...

My post about MeadCo ScriptX and browser-based printing got me thinking that browsers should allow print configuration on a per site basis. Think about it: you print different vastly things from different sites, and with the proliferation of Web apps, there are so many more times when you need to ...

I'm doing a project with Ektron CMS400.Net right now, and that system relies pretty heavily on XSL, which I hate. I really think XSL is a tool of devil, meant just to drive me mad. But I digress. I needed a good little XSL authoring app. XMLSpy is the absolute ...

I spent last night trying to get a new motherboard to work. If you've ever done this, you're probably familiar with the situation where you get everything put together, all the wires connected, you fire up the board, and nothing happens. It's pretty frustrating, since the motherboard knows what's wrong, ...

Chris Pederick is the guy who makes the awesome Firefox Web Developer Toolbar, so he gets free beer from me if he ever needs to drop by Sioux Falls for any reason. We've talked up Chris' toolbar since way back, and it takes CSS development from a headache to a ...

Well, I went ahead and upgraded to Movable Type 3.1 with the free version I got from joining the MT Professionals Network (still trying to find a catch...). Note that if you're considering a 3.1 upgrade, wait there are errors in the upgrade scripts that Six Apart is working ...

Ektron.com :: Web Image Editor : Ektron WebImageFX: I haven't seen an embedded, Web-based image editor before. Have I just not been looking hard enough? Are there others I'm not aware of? If not for the IE-only problem, this seems like a good one. There are some Flash demos here. ...

Extension Room :: Popup ALT Attributes: Interesting little flamewar going on over at the Mozilla Extension Room. First, here's something I didn't know: The ALT tag for images is NOT supposed to produce a little tooltip when you mouseover an image, according to the HTML spec. This is supposed to ...

I'm a nomad these days -- I split my time between two offices, one with a Windows domain, and one without. Because of this, I've decided to remove my computer from the domain to which it was attached. I still have my domain user account to access resources, but my ...

If you don't read the New York Times, you may not know that Firefox has a two-page ad in today's edition promoting itself. This got me thinking: with all the momentum behind Firefox, what is to become of Opera? If I was working for Opera, how would I feel about ...

I'm currently looking for a ColdFusion MX hosting provider (no, I haven't found another shiny object we inherited a bunch of sites from someone else). I thought I had found a good one that was recommended by someone I trust, but their new customer sign-up interface threw a fatal, ...

It seems that there's always some consternation in the web design community regarding the styling of form elements. Usability studies and user observation has taught them that they shouldn't be applying styles to form controls; if you change the look of the control, it's less recognizable for novice users who ...

Most developers would say that content binding is the domain of XSL. However, I've found there is a CSS property for binding arbitrary content to an element, and it's been around since 1998. Sadly, IE has no support for it, Netscape / Mozilla just partial, and apparently Opera is the ...

I'm on one of my "shiny object" tangents lately. The latest thing is non-Microsoft software. I don't know why, but I suddenly feel the need to be all counter-culture-ish and find alternatives to the standbys. I've been browsing with Mozilla all week, and I don't think I'll go back to ...

Here's something a little scary for anyone who uses Outlook Web Access. Watch out for the links you click in emails, because your browser may send a whole lot of information about you in the HTTP Referer header. Browsing through my log files the other day, I found this as ...

I had to remove some nasty spyware yesterday from an employee's home machine. It was an IE search toolbar (I'm not going to say the name since I'd rather take a shotgun blast to the face than give them any publicity) that generated a JavaScript error on any search results ...

I occasionally run into situations where it would be really great to add an 'intellisense' feature to a text input on a web form. That is, something along the lines of AutoComplete or Google Suggest. There are a bunch of scripts available on the Internets to handle this for you, ...

Onfolio: An interesting new app for organizing information you find online. It'd be better, I think, as a Web-based app rather than a client tool. Watch the Flash presentation here for the quick skinny. My question is, is there a need for this product? In the end, this seems like ...

This is going to seem obvious, but I hit on something today about Ajax. I knew this in the back of my head, but it jumped to the front today -- Ajax can do a lot, but the most simple and powerful thing it can do in certain, specific instances ...

About four months ago, I asked you all to send me a screencap of the Gadgetopia home page sitting in your browser window. I promised to do some analysis of the results, and I kept meaning to get to it, but never got to it. Tonight, I finally sat down ...

My wife sent a Hallmark eCard to someone today. She picked a format then typed a paragraph or so of text. The length of her prose was nothing out of the ordinary. Hallmark then generated an email to the recipient and CC'd my wife. In this email was a link ...

I'm going to kick off a new weekly series this week I'm calling "The Basics"; Here's the idea: Every time I need to write some JavaScript for feature X on a new site I'm building, I always just go back to the last site I remember writing feature X for, ...

I changed the URL scheme of this Web site over the weekend. I had been meaning to do it for a while, but some problems with Movable Type 3.2 kind of forced the issue. (I have got to stop rushing into every beta that presents itself...) To make everything backwards ...

Can we finally admit that the FrontPage experiment has failed? You know -- the promise that FrontPage will allow novice Web authors to create and maintain (especially maintain) good, solid Web sites? Can we finally admit that this just isn't going to happen? How many people know someone that is ...