Code added to my XHTML source files giving problems

Posted by Leif on November 18, 2005, 6:56 pm

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Hello All,

Last week (11 Nov 05) with the Subject header: "XHTML 1.0 Strict validation
problem", I tried to describe a validation problem with text added to my
source files in XHTML.

I was asked to publish the code by several members of this group, but
hesitated initially as I was not sure my organisation would allow/accept it,
however here it is:

http://www.npc.nato.int/htm/home.htm

If you try to validate the page using the bottom left URL marked XHTML you
will discover that the page fails to validate due to an error on line 79
column 85 concerning the attribute autocomplete="Off".

However, as maintainer of this page I can assure everybody that I have never
used this attribute. The source file do certainly not have this attribute,
so it must be added by somebody or something else ??? Who, what and why ???

I have also noted that most of URL's have got something added like the
following:
?tsfsg=c13c0c805f0331c7eb1d7d5e78b6ba94, which is alsocompletely unknown to
me.

Last but not least I am not able to see the source code using menu
View/source as normal (browser ie version 6.0 sp2).

Thanks for any clarification you can provide.

Posted by Stan Brown on November 18, 2005, 5:15 pm

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Seems to me you've got bigger problems. I see a menu down the left, a
Google search bar at the right, and a big white space in the middle.

Oh yes, and at the top I see "Loading menu ... If not browser
supported, use out Sitemap for navigation."

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2.1 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Why We Won't Help You:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/05/05/why_we_wont_help_you

Posted by Stan Brown on November 18, 2005, 5:24 pm

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I don't think anyone has mentioned yet that Javascript navigation may
actually be illegal on the above Web site, since it's NATO and many
of the member countries have legislation about accessibility.

I'm not a lawyer, and I don't live in Europe where (I'm told) those
laws exist. Can anyone provide more information?

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2.1 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Why We Won't Help You:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/05/05/why_we_wont_help_you

Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on November 18, 2005, 10:41 pm

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Last time I checked, the USA was a member of NATO, and there is legislation
there ("Section 508") on accessibility. It might apply, since I think NATO is
in part funded by the US federal government.

JavaScript navigation as such is not prohibited, but:

"When pages utilize scripting languages to display content, or to create
interface elements, the information provided by the script shall be
identified with functional text that can be read by assistive technology."
http://www.section508.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Content&ID=12#Web

See also explanations of this at:
http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/guide/1194.22.htm

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

Posted by Alan J. Flavell on November 18, 2005, 7:50 pm

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On Fri, 18 Nov 2005, Leif wrote:

...
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Is this being served-out by some server-side processor, that's
mangling your original source before sending it out to the web?

For example, inserting the snippet of code for the google search?

For example, sticking random numbers onto all the URLs in order to
make the site cache-hostile? As if these HTTP response headers
weren't bad enough:

Server: webserver
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate
Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Last-Modified: Fri Nov 18 19:21:39 2005
...
Pragma: no-cache

- claiming that the page was last modified just seconds before it was
retrieved, but had already expired in the last millennium, and so
on...

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Quite.

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Get a proper web browser and developer tools, such as Mozilla with the
web developer toolbar. Design for the web, not for MSIE.

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Design a less hostile web page.

Do a sanity check with a text browser:

| Powered by Google logo

No, it's not powered by the Google logo...

| Get Acrobat Reader logo

No, I don't want the logo, thank you. This makes no sense.

At least, on the text browser it was possible to identify the link to
the site map - which is more than can be said for the graphical view.

Oh, I begin to get it - this javascript stuff that's called out from
the end of the page, like:

<script type='text/javascript'
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When the browser (in this case Mozilla) attempts to retrieve the URL
of the script, the server sends it a 302 redirection, along with a
cookie: the redirection is to the URL of an HTML page and, not
surprisingly, Mozilla throws a javascript error when fed with an HTML
page instead of javascript.

HTTP/1.1 302 OK
Pragma: no-cache
Connection: close
Server: webserver
Set-Cookie:
st8id=6a9a38d9b6bfb7cc8891d96d068d72d8.00.a1d0f4480995293c59f3758d7
0e2feed.AAjLhk3FVSGNpwCAXfBknKUwv6yofN7m1u8M55u+WCc18yqd9m0jWDFeNZ8j64QSxj7S9q1
7N+GH7mqwEwnvhjEX0ZlE51PukdwSs3FE5uCF7uda3nJnPv7vLL7UZTPE14rfoyFHP5akudnzytY2rp
z8ZJoJTj503DID1GNOEBZexQH/N6azB34TE58=; domain=.npc.nato.int; path=/
Accept-Ranges: none
Location:
http://www.npc.nato.int/?tsfsg=9a5b8a3a897394f93240b9f7e175f336
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This is an HTML page, not javascript

What an enormous effort to achieve hostile results! And I'll bet it's
a lot worse under the covers than we can see from the outside.