web posts

Ideas: Cascading Behavior Sheets, a declarative alternative to JS

in

I have had the idea for some time that the web ought to have a declarative format to define behavior on elements like it does for styles (CSS). It would be an alternative to JavaScript (JS) that would be as robust as CSS, simplifying adding and defining common behaviors. There are a lot of things sites do frequently that can take a fair amount of work for a new person to implement, as well as require a payload sent over the wire. For people who don’t need complications beyond standard, this could be provided by the browser with some configuration in a simple sheet. I think there should be a Cascading Behavior Sheet (CBS) standard for the web.

Potential advantages:

  • robust forward and backward compatibility like CSS
  • simpler, easier to learn format than JS
  • little to write or think about for common functionality
  • little to send over wire for common functionality
  • more performant native implementation possible
  • declarative
  • familiar syntax to CSS devs
  • simple to connect behavior broadly to chosen selectors
  • cascade, @media, @support, etc to limit which and when behaviors apply
  • automatic handling of attaching and removing behaviors when they apply / don’t, including new DOM elements
  • maintain separation of concerns that keeping JS and CSS separate provides
Continue reading post "Ideas: Cascading Behavior Sheets, a declarative alternative to JS"

in

Porkbun DNS seems to be down and has been so for the last several hours at least. I have added Fastmail nameservers to my NS list so that things work for the moment, since I get that as part of my account there. Can’t for my client though, who I had recommended Porkbun to.

jQuery AJAX and multipart form handling

in

I recently had need to submit a web form with file fields via AJAX. The application uses jQuery and was already submitting forms just fine without file fields using the .serialize() method to pass data to a jQuery.ajax() call. That didn’t seem to handle the file fields, though. Searching the internet, I found a solution using the browser built in FormData object.

Continue reading post "jQuery AJAX and multipart form handling"

JS: ES Modules and Node bare specifiers via response rewrite

in

I’ve been playing with JS lately, including ES modules and building with Rollup, Babel, and Terser, along with other accessories. One thing I’m disappointed with of ES modules in the Nodejs ecosystem is dealing with third party imports. Using the “bare” specifiers that Node expects works fine in that environment and thus tools running in it (possibly needing helpers), but they don’t work at all directly in the browser. This is discussed in this post by Jake Archibold, for instance.

Import maps are one solution in the works, but that requires explicitly mapping every dependency, which could get complicated fast when dependencies have dependencies. It also is only in draft stage and only works in Blink based browsers currently.

I eventually gave in to the idea of having server code rewrite the paths in the js file responses to point to a symlinked node_modules folder, similar to what is mentioned in this post by the Polymer project. I created a PHP test server for one of my projects that does this.

Continue reading post "JS: ES Modules and Node bare specifiers via response rewrite"

Fallback webfont and emoji

in

Recently I found that browsers will download a fallback webfont (@font-face) to try to find an emoji or other missing character. I was looking at the perf characteristics of my site when I noticed that the browser was downloading a webfont that wasn’t being used at all. After some digging, I found that the browser was going down through the full font stack to try to find an emoji I had added to that page, downloading the webfont on the way.

This is probably not a common setup, but I have a webfont in my font stack down stack from some similar common system fonts, as a fallback just in case. It uses a nice system font unless it can’t find it, in which case it uses the webfont, unless it can’t use that, in which case it uses a less desirable system font or the generic font class.

Continue reading post "Fallback webfont and emoji"

Fighting form spam

in

Cogneato has dozens of sites with openly submittable forms on them, and they have no doubt all had some level of problems with spam submissions. Bots, and perhaps people, like to share their links or services, try to hack sites, or whatever other nefarious or annoying purposes they may have through forms, which require some sort of server side processing, and will possibly result in human processing as well, such as with sent emails, database data, or comments on a website.

Spammers have gotten more sophisticated over time, and over the last year or two, have really started to hit Cogneato’s sites hard and get past the protections we had in place. We’ve had to add protections on forms that didn’t have them before, and use more techniques to attempt to detect spam. We’ve recently added a set of checks of the submitted form data and the submitter IP address that produces a score of “spaminess” that we can then use to block the submission if the score is above a threshold. That score script is the primary purpose of this post, but I will cover the other techniques we use as well.

Continue reading post "Fighting form spam"

Looking at Apache logs with command line tools

in

In my web development career, I have countless times needed to look at Apache logs to figure out or find out about problems with sites, monitor activity, or for various other purposes. I’ve used command line tools to help with this, often looking for strings and counting occurrences. Since I recently needed to create a command string to count unique IP’s connected to a given string in the logs, I thought I’d post about it and a few related useful commands.

Continue reading post "Looking at Apache logs with command line tools"