Cascading stylesheets

As the initial HTML designs evolved to include a growing body of eye candy, the language ended up mixing very specific visual presentation cues with content classification directives; for example, a similar inline syntax would denote that the following piece of text is an element of a numbered list, or that it needs to be shown in 72 pt Comic Sans font. This notation, although convenient to use on new pages, made it very difficult to automatically adjust appearance of a document without altering its structure (for example to account for mobile devices, printable views, or accessibility requirements), or to accurately preserve document structure when moving the data to non-HTML media or new site layouts.

Cascading Style Sheets is a simple ... Read more »

HTML entity encoding

HTML features a special encoding scheme called HTML entities. The purpose of this scheme is to make it possible to safely render certain reserved HTML characters (e.g., < > &) within documents, as well as to carry high bit characters safely over 7-bit media. The scheme nominally permits three types of notation:

Pseudo URL schemes

In addition to the aforementioned "true" URL schemes, modern browsers support a large number of pseudo-schemes used to implement various advanced features, such as encapsulating encoded documents within URLs, providing legacy scripting features, or giving access to internal browser information and data views.

Encapsulating schemes are of interest to any link-handling applications, as these methods usually impose specific non-standard content parsing or rendering modes on top of existing resources specified in the later part of the URL. The underlying content is retrieved using HTTP, looked up locally (e.g., file:///), or obtained using other generic method - and, depending on how it's then handled, may execute in the security context associated with the origin of this data. For example, the following ... Read more »

Browser Security Handbook, part 1

• Written and maintained by Michal Zalewski <lcamtuf@google.com>.
• Copyright 2008, 2009 Google Inc, rights reserved.
• Released under terms and conditions of the CC-3.0-BY license.

Table of Contents

• ← Back to introduction

• Basic concepts behind web browsers
• Uniform Resource Locators
• Unicode in URLs
< ... Read more »