As Mozilla continues to rise in popularity and gain market share, some websites are being revealed as poorly coded or not up to date. Even well established and respected companies are missing the point. Take the San Diego Business Journal as a prime example. Works in IE, and even seems to be updated daily. In Mozilla however, the homepage will not even load. Does this represent new opportunities for web developers to go "fix up" these naively IE only websites? Yup. Is there a good chance that the same decision makers will choose another web development firm which lacks the ability and/or foresight to build a cross platform website? Yup. Note: All of my emails to the newspaper about this problem have gone into a black hole. I have to assume they know about this problems and either don't understand it or don't care about it.

Today I came across a gotcha with the way Firefox saves username and password information for login forms. This may also be a problem with IE and other browsers/toolbar/add ons, but I've never used this feature in anything but Firefox. Here's the situation: Firefox saves username/password combinations per domain, not per individual page. This means that it will attempt to use the same username and password on a member login (/members/login.cfm) and an admin console (/admin/login.cfm). That's not really a big deal because it doesn't really create a security concern, and if you have different logins for the two forms, you just end up re-typing things. Here's the problem: Say you are editing a user's account in the admin section of your website/intranet/application. If the field names match the names in your login form (ie: username/password), then firefox will OVERWRITE the value specified in the value="" attribute of the INPUT tag and will insert your saved login information instead. That's right, it overwrites any values you've programatically populated the form with If you aren't paying close attention when you edit a user, it's very easy to submit the form with the newly inserted login info in it. Granted, there should be some biz logic that prevents the form submission from being successful, but I'll bet there are plenty of systems out there today without this vital bit of logic. If you suddenly find that 10 accounts in your application share the same username and password, this could very well be the reason. The solution: This is probably a good idea either way, but the solution I've used is to make sure that your login forms have distinct and different field names than your administration tool's user profile edit forms. A quick solution to a very odd problem.

With the latest Preview Release of Firefox, I've noticed that it autodiscovers RSS feeds, flagging pages containing RSS alternatives in the lower right corner of the page as this example snapshot of Slashdot shows. As I've been browsing around the web, it's been interesting and surprising to see some of the sites that have RSS alternatives. It's also been interesting to see which sites (including alot of Blogs) have RSS enabled, but don't have the proper code in the head of the page to flag the content for browsers such as Firefox to detect. Am I talking about you? Well here's all you have to add to your HTML head to make your RSS feed autodetectable: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.sumoc.com/blog/rss.cfm?mode=full" />

I've recently been attempting to learn more about web standards and moving away from things like using tables for layout purposes and the dreaded font tag. In the process I've collected a couple of resources that are a great read on the subject. I thought I would share them for others currently heading down this same path. CSS Zen Garden - Great example of applying different CSS style sheets to a single XHTML 1.0 Strict document to achieve ~100 *completely* different looks. Position is Everything - Articles, tutorials, and links on CSS, the Box Model, browsers quirks, and more. MACCAWS - Making A Commercial Case for Adopting Web Standards. MACCAWS core mission is "To provide Web authors with the resources necessary to promote Web standards as a commercially desirable choice for clients." (via David Foltz on WebSanDiego)