Goodies to Go ™
April 29, 2002–Newsletter #178
This newsletter is part of the internet.com network.
http://www.internet.com
Goodies Thoughts – Charney Who?
Have you heard of Scott
Charney yet? Well, Microsoft hopes that you will be hearing lots of good things
about him soon. He is Microsoft’s new Security Czar that is supposed to combat
and squash all of the evil hackers that have been plaguing Microsoft’s IIS for
more than a year now.
IIS has been unfortunate
victim of some of the nastiest viruses ever conceived like Nimda and Code Red
which caused major loss of time and data all across the nation and the world.
With such high profile cases and a less than stellar reputation on security,
does Microsoft really believe that most folks are going to be anything more than
skeptical about their new Czar improving things in the near future?
So, who is this Charney
guy and what is he supposed to be doing?
I’ll bet your first
guess would be that Mr. Charney is a certified computer geek that has been
programming and managing since he was old enough to walk and type on his TRS-80.
Well, actually he’s a lawyer, a prosecutor to be exact. Not what you expected?
He does have a
background in cybercrime, however. From 1991 to 1999 he was the chief of
computer crime and intellectual property unit at the Department of Justice. So,
at least he has had some experience catching the people spawn the viruses.
Microsoft hopes that this background will give them an edge in catching new
cybercriminals and preventing them from doing any damage in the first place.
In a recent interview
Mr. Charney said "My job has two parts, one is the technical stuff and the other
is the policy stuff. I’m surrounded by technical people. Where I am weak, there
are many others who are strong." Let’s hope so.
Microsoft has said that
they have moved security up to their number one priority which I guess must be
better than the top priority slot it used to be in. Security, in fact, is now so
important that it will possibly take priority over some product enhancements and
upgrades.
As an ASP developer I am
periodically annoyed by not only the viruses but by the patches and updates that
have to be installed on the servers. My thought is that better planning and
preparation on security issues BEFORE a product is released is a much better
approach than plugging the dike after it has already sprung a leak. I must say I
was glad to hear Mr. Charney have the same point of view. Simply stated, he
declared that Microsoft needs to reduce the number of patches that are released
and improve the patching process.
Don’t get me wrong, I do
appreciate the improvements in technology that Microsoft has provided over the
years. However, I truly hope that Microsoft is sincere about their new and
improved renewed commitment to security. I hope to never see another virus make
the headlines like Nimda and Code Red did.
Thanks for reading!
Quiz Goodies
Each week we get all
kinds of questions about creating and using forms. So, this week we’ll test your
knowledge of forms.
What do you know about
Radio Buttons? How are they created, organized and what are their basic
elements?
Read answer below.
Q & A Goodies
Questions are taken from
submissions to our Community Mentors. You can ask a Mentor a question by going
to
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/mentors/.
Q. I just
recently created my first form. I made a formmail.pl.
If I was to make another form for something else, would I have to call it
formmail1.pl or anything I like like ben.pl or is there something else that I
would have to call it?
A. A Perl file
can work for multiple forms. The question is whether fields will have the same
name in different forms and need to do different things. For example, make sure
fields called "address" don’t refer to e-mail addresses in one form and mailing
addresses in another. Think ahead to how many forms you might have and how
similar they are, and what will make the most sense for ongoing maintenance.
*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community. The answer was provided
by Eric Ferguson, one of our HTML Mentors.
Q. I’m using a
form to capture the user’s name and other details and storing them in a cookie
— which works — for the purpose of making the site more "personal": so the
site displays their name when they revisit etc. But the only way of displaying
strings in the HTML document that I’ve been able to find is displaying it
through form elements (such as a text box) — is there a way of displaying
JavaScript variables in HTML pages as plain text?
A. You can
use document.write to write out the variables. You would place the script in the
body section of your document where you want it to appear.
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="javascript">
document.write("Hello "+name_variable+" how are you today")
document.close()
</SCRIPT>
The document.close is needed for Netscape 4 version browsers.
*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community. The answer was provided
by Jim Young, one of our JavaScript Mentors.
Q. I
divided my page into two frame columns. My one problem is when I try to return
to my start up page, it reloads the navigation bar (the first frame) again. How
can this be avoided?
A.
Try putting a target in that link of target="_top" this will reload the whole
page and avoid a frame within a frame!
*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community. The answer was provided
by Alex Newport, one of our HTML Mentors.
News Goodies
A new bill regarding online privacy
rules could cause many e-commerce companies a great many headaches in the near
future.
Click here to read the article
Apparently Microsoft is not the only
target of hackers. It seems the nations #1 ISP, AOL, was also hit recently.
Click here to read the article
Microsoft has XP, now Macromedia has
MX. Read about Macromedia’s newest integrated collection of tool, server, and
client technologies; the first fruits of their merger with Allaire.
Click here to read the article
Quiz Answer
With the trend towards
more and more interaction between the web surfer and the web site, forms have
become a very common and necessary component in web development.
With that said we’ll
answer the question above by starting with an example:
<FORM METHOD="POST"
ACTION="ProcessPage.asp">
<P><INPUT TYPE="radio" NAME="ButtonGroup"
VALUE="Choice1" CHECKED > Choice 1</P>
<P><INPUT TYPE="radio" NAME="ButtonGroup"
VALUE="Choice2"> Choice 2</P>
<P><INPUT TYPE="submit" value="Submit" name="B1"></P>
</FORM>
Each HTML form that you
create must begin and end with a <FORM> tag. This let’s the browser know that
this section of code will be accepting input from the user.
Within the form is where
you will create any form elements that you need which, in our case, will just be
radio buttons. Now, radio buttons have a very unique quality among form elements
in that they function as a group. Here’s how that works:
First, each form element
begins with <INPUT>. This is true of all form elements like text boxes, check
boxes, etc. Then you will declare the TYPE which let’s the browser know what
element to display; "radio" for radio buttons.
Next you will need to
give the group of radio buttons a common name. In the example above we used "ButtonGroup"
as our name. This means that each radio button with the NAME "ButtonGroup" will
all be grouped together allowing the user to only select one of the buttons in
the group. This is the radio button’s unique quality. You can also have multiple
groups of buttons within a form by simply using different NAMEs for each
grouping.
Now you will need to
give each button a unique name so that you will be able to effectively use the
information the user has input. You use the VALUE attribute to give each button
its own unique name.
Lastly, there’s the
CHECKED attribute. This tells the browser to make this button the default button
and go ahead and check it.
There are many more
attributes available to you such as the ONBLUR, ONFOCUS and ONCLICK attributes
which are used in specialized circumstances. The example above, however, should
give you the necessary basics to create and use radio buttons.
And Remember This . . .
Do you know what great
fashion event occurred today in history?
Today marks the
anniversary of a revolutionary fashion patent given to Gideon Sundback from
Hoboken, New jersey in 1913. He invented a wonderful new fastener intended to
"replace" the button which came to be known as the zipper. Unlike many other
inventions, the zipper was aptly named for the sound that it made when opening
and closing instead of being named after its inventor. Could you imagine calling
the zipper the sundback?
Thanks for reading Goodies to Go!