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Archive for July, 2004

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Renegade Redesign

There was an interesting article in Wired News yesterday:

Changing the Face of Web Surfing. Though I like the title “renegade redesign” better.

Nutshell: Web designers (like me) who care about the fact that everyone should be able to see a Web site, are creating accessible versions of web sites they use that aren’t currently accessible (or even visible in every browser), and hosting the copied version. They are praised by the general audience of the Web sites, for creating a site that provides exactly the same info, but is much easier to use. And they are getting sued, or fired by the owners of the original Web site. /nutshell

“If you want a job done properly, do it yourself,” the saying goes. Web users frustrated by poorly designed sites are increasingly applying that logic to the Net. Many who are fed up with high-profile design mess-ups are taking it upon themselves to publicly correct conspicuous corporate faux pas, right under embarrassed proprietors’ noses.

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David Jones republishes articles from Wales’ National Assembly website on his own Assembly Online site because the official designers “clearly don’t know what they’re doing.” “They’re singularly clueless; the HTML and CSS are invalid,” he said. “I was exasperated, so I thought I’d do it myself to show them how it might be done. My employer — an Assembly-funded body looking to secure next year’s funding — cited it as a disciplinary offense. I don’t work for that company anymore.” Though common standards for building Web pages are developed and governed by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, few can force designers to make a site that’s easy to use. The result can often be code that clutters pages and confuses users.

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“Not all businesses have yet understood the advantage in ensuring their websites are accessible to people with disabilities, who constitute a significant percentage of the marketplace,” she said. “In time, inaccessible websites will likely go the way of buildings with stairs but no ramps at the entrance.”

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I actually did something similar for ISU Extension’s homepage, though, instead of getting fired, or sued, they used it :)

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Posted July 21st, 2004 in Web Design by Matt

Internet Explorer ‘too risky’ says Businessweek

I’m about a week behind in posting this (I got lazy), but I thought I’d put it here for posterity.

Businessweek columnist Stephen Wildstrom says that Internet Explorer is too risky to use

In late June, network security experts saw one of their worst fears realized. Attackers exploited a pair of known but unpatched flaws in Microsoft’s Web server software and Internet Explorer browser to compromise seemingly safe Web sites. People who browsed there on Windows computers got infected with malicious code without downloading anything

In a sligtly techier article on EWeek, their senior editor says that Internet Explorer is TOO DANGEROUS TO KEEP (emphasis mine).

Ladies and gentlemen, computer experts say that IE is dangerous.

Many of the people talking about the exploit have discussed how your computers might be used by these back-door programs to launch a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. Yeah, that’s bad news, but that’s not the real problem. In the few days that the sites provided the Trojan horses, hundreds of thousands or millions of users could have had their credit-card, stock-brokerage and bank-account numbers and passwords stolen. Let me repeat myself: Millions of you may have every bit of your browser-driven online financial security information stolen.

The government is even starting to recommend that people move away from IE. US Computer Emergency Response Team puts out updates about how to secure your system against intrustion. From what I’ve read they suggest shutting down pretty much every feature in IE. They also say explicitly:

“Microsoft Internet Explorer does not adequately validate the security context of a frame that has been redirected by a Web server. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to evaluate script in different security domains. By causing script to be evaluated in the Local Machine Zone, the attacker could execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running IE.“

The part I bolded was the important (non-techie) part. A hacker could use security “holes” in IE to do pretty much whatever he wanted on your computer. He will have access to everything you have access to, everything you type, and everything you see. user names, passwords, bank balances, bank card numbers, blog entries! you name it.

Switch to Mozilla. Firefox is only a 5 MB download. It automatically imports your bookmarks. Do it.

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Posted July 8th, 2004 in Web Design by Matt

Not Our Home Sidebar Project

I have and idea. It probably isn’t original or all that innovative, but here goes:

Objective: create a script that will organize the “blog roll” on NotOurHome.com (or any other site using that set of links) by whoever posted most recently. Also, it will only include a person on the link list if they have posted in the last 3 or 4 days.

This project needs to be done in PHP, and will probably (certainly) use the RSS feeds from each blog.

Anyone (tony?) want to help with this?

1 Comment

Posted July 2nd, 2004 in Web Design by Matt

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