Indistinguishable from Blogging

This blog and The Burning Edge are now powered by WordPress rather than Movable Type. I'll write more about the switch soon.

The blogidate XML well-formedness bookmarklet now works for XML that is longer than several kilobytes. Previously, if it found an error in long XML, it wouldn't highlight the error or tell you what line it was on, and gave an error message instead. The fix was to add a Node.normalize() call before trying to extract the text of the error page generated by Firefox.

I primarily use this bookmarklet to help keep my blogs valid, but it also saves me time by catching errors that cause bad rendering in real browsers, such as forgetting to close a <strong>.

Original post about the bookmarklet

I have trouble completing personal projects that take longer than a weekend. I often lose interest after doing the interesting parts and procrastinate indefinitely on completing the projects since they have no deadline. In August 2004, I set a goal compatible with my attention span: "start and finish one interesting project every weekend". This goal helped me write a bunch of Firefox extensions and one or two Firefox patches, but of course it didn't help me finish longer projects. Now I have several half-finished longer-than-a-weekend projects piled up.

I'm hoping that this "coming soon" post will make me finish at least some of these projects soon. Also, you can tell me which projects you want me to finish first.

• A novel attack against something that was proven secure using a what I think is a poor definition of security.
• A proof that a popular puzzle is NP-complete.
• A list of some of Firefox's weaknesses, design elements that can lead to security holes.
• Security tips for Firefox users (current version). Since this document is already 7 printed pages long without screenshots, it may be more effective at pointing out critical user interface flaws in Firefox and Windows than at educating users.
• Security tips for web application developers (current version).
• Security tips for Firefox developers and extension developers (current version).

A spammer posted the following comment on my old blog post Chrome URLs in Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird yesterday:

I've been a long time user of both IE and Netscape. Now I'm using Mozilla and Firebird. Although I'm a fan of Mozilla and Firebird and have recommended it to friends.

The poster's URL had a spammy-looking domain name ("success-biz-replica"), but the site itself didn't look too spammy and the comment seemed fairly on-topic, so I didn't delete the comment. But today I stumbled on a very similar comment here and realized the comments were spam. The spammer probably decided to spam blogs mentioning Mozilla because those blogs are likely to have high Google PageRank.

I went into my web server logs to see what search phrase she used. I figured it would be something like mozilla "post a comment" "remember personal info" but I wanted to see the exact search phrase. I searched for the poster's IP address and found this:

193.230.197.6 - - [26/Oct/2003:11:07:05 -0800] "GET /archives/000007.html HTTP/1.0" 200 12252 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Alexa Toolbar)"

There was no referer, which probably just means she hid the referer intentionally. But I noticed something else: she used Internet Explorer to post the comment.

I deleted the comment.

In a comment on my previous blog post, Simon Willison writes: "I'm not too keen on popping up a new window with an external validation service. How about an alternative bookmarklet that just validates XML well-formedness (essential for those of us who use XHTML)?"

Try the new blogidate well-formedness bookmarklet. If this bookmarklet finds an error, it turns the textarea red, selects the part of the textarea where the error is, and puts the error message in the status bar (not in a dialog). If it doesn't find an error, it turns the textarea green.

Update Jan 21, 2005: added a normalize() call so the bookmarklet won't fail when the XML is more than a few kilobytes.

Update Sept 2, 2005: the Valid XHTML user script, which is based on this bookmarklet, is even more cool.

"Blogidate" is a new bookmarklet that lets you validate the HTML in a blog post before posting it. It works in Mozilla but not in IE or Opera. To use it, choose the version that matches your blog's doctype and drag it to your bookmarks toolbar.

• blogidate html4.01 transitional
• blogidate html4.01 strict
• blogidate xhtml1 transitional
• blogidate xhtml1 strict

Here's a textarea so you can test the bookmarklet on this page: