mrclay.rg

String Subtypes for Safer Web Programming

Valid HTML markup involves several different contexts and escaping rules, yet many APIs give no precise indication of which context their string return values are escaped for, or how strings should be escaped before being passed in (let’s not even get into character encoding). Most programming languages only have a single String type, so there’s

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Simpler API for Zend’s built-in Firebug Logger

Zend Framework has functionality to send messages to the Firebug console (via Firefox’s FirePHP addon), but if you’re not using the ZF front controller, the API is a bit of a pain. Besides your instance of Zend_Log, you must keep track of a few additional objects just to manually flush the headers after all your

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Content Delivery and Format Fail

The pic on the right is from The Berrics’ “New Year’s Dae” video. The skating is amazing—well worth a dollar—and the site’s registration and checkout was painless, but the rest has been a disappointment: There’s no way to download this “downloadable part,” as it’s advertised. You must install an Adobe Air application, which downloads the

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?YouWontSeeMe

In beta 11, Opera’s going to hide all “http(s)://”, and also all querystrings (until you focus the addressbar). Opera’s devs are right that users consider them mostly “gibberish”, but I think this change could cause a ton of problems and confusion for people, especially support staff, and there are plenty of sites/apps still out there

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A Zend Framework App in a Single File

Most PHP micro-frameworks I’ve reviewed have some major cons: incomplete namespacing of functions/classes/global vars; doing too much/little; being under-tested; and the worst: forcing a unique (and usually under-documented) code structure that will make it difficult to “graduate” an app into a more full-featured framework. It also seems silly to rely on “micro-optimized” code if performance

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