Web

A person dear to me, who is new to the tech world, asked me a simple question: “What is a static website?” It was asked in response to me saaying that I have a static website–this website you are reading. Tech Jargon and Shibboleths Once again it dawns on me how often jargon slips into normal conversation and acts like a shibboleth. It’s hard to place one’s self squarely back into the shoes of someone that has no frame of reference. If you want to get a feeling for what this is like, try to remember that at some point in your life, you would not have understood the words on this page. Even worse, you wouldn’t even be learned enough determine what is a word and what is not. This is hard for you to remember because you don’t–or barely–remember being illiterate. If you want a sense of that, go look at a book written in a completely different language. For example, if your first language is English, go look at a book in Hindi. I always find it fascinating, scary and humbling that I cannot tell what is a word, what is punctuation, or anything when I look at a completely different language; these new languages appear to me as tally marks as I’m certain English appears this way to a North American child. ...

There are many ways to navigate a website these days, especially on mobile where you can swipe, pinch, and touch. But what about the people on Desktops that use keyboards? Let’s be nice to them. One trait of seasoned computer users that I’ve seen is that they start to use their mouse less often and rely more heavily on keyboard shortcuts. When it comes to reading websites, you can scroll with your arrow keys, but what about jumping to relevant sections on a web page? You could use the PgUp and PgDown keys on your keyboard, however many people now use laptops, and those keys are buried in a Control/Function-key combination, so I doubt they get much use (I don’t have data on this, it’s merely from my own experience). ...

I am working with a client right now on their Web application. While creating an account to do testing, I noticed a glaring security issue that allows people to harvest usernames. This topic has been covered before, I am still surprised that it keeps popping up around the Web, but this time is a bit different. I should note that the client knows about the issue, but what I want to point out in this article is how insidious the issue becomes. ...