I want to discuss a (minor) antipattern that I think is (slightly) harmful. Lots of websites use large Javascript libraries. They often include them by using a 3rd party Content Delivery Network like so: <script src=”https://cdn.example.com/js/library-v1.2.3.js”></script> There are, supposedly, a couple of advantages to doing things this way. Users may already have the JS library…
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A few months ago, British Airways’ customers had their credit card details stolen. How was this possible? The best guess goes something like this: BA had 3rd party JS on its payment page <script src=”https://example.com/whatever.js”></script> The 3rd party’s site was hacked, and the JS was changed. BA’s customers ran the script, which then harvested their…
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Scratching my own itch here… GitHub users have a username (mine is @edent) and have a user ID number (mine is #837136). If you want to redirect a user ID to a username, you can use the little service I’ve cobbled together: https://edent.github.io/github_id/#837136 That will take your browser to my GitHub page, using nothing but…
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For my contact page, I wanted a generic calendar icon to let people view my diary. Calendar icons are almost always a skeuomorph of a paper calendar, but I wondered if I could make it slightly more useful by creating a dynamic icon. Here it is, an SVG calendar which always display’s today’s date: The…
Continue reading →I’ve started using Google Cloud Vision for running text detection on OpenBenches images. There’s just one problem – Google limits the size of the files that it will accept to 4MB. Why? Who knows! Obviously, it’s easy to shrink an image server-side, but how do we do it in the browser? First, let’s take a…
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I’d like to propose that web designers around the world spend one day this year browsing the web with JavaScript disabled. I’m tentatively calling this “International No Javascript UseR Experience Day” or INJURED for short. A few weeks ago, a reader of my blog complained that all they saw was a blank screen. As Liz…
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How much checking do we perform that our code is running as intended? I found a curious bug this weekend, which made me think about some of the assumptions that we use when programming. Imagine sorting an array using JavaScript. var arr = [10, 5, 66, 8, 1, 3]; arr.sort(); So far, so normal. Create…
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In 2009, Kosso and I petitioned Twitter to allow us to search for Tweets by their “in reply to” ID. The idea was that developers could created a properly threaded view of conversations. Of course, Twitter being ultra-responsive to developers, did absolutely nothing. Skip three years into the future, and App.net is providing all the…
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Ahhhh! The BBC. Shining bastion of purity in a sea of commercial malaise. Nothing can spoil its lustre. Well, for those of us in the UK. For the poor sods who find themselves living in the wilderness of ROW (Rest Of World) this is their BBC experience… The reasons for me seeing this are rather…
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