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We think of our job as controlling the user's experience. But the reality is, we control far less than we imagine.
Last week, two events reminded us, yet again, of how right Douglas Crockford was when he declared the web "the most hostile software engineering environment imaginable." Both were serious enough to take down an entire site—actually hundreds of entire sites, as it turned out. And both were avoidable.
[...] The first of these incidents involved the launch of Chrome 66. With that release, Google implemented a security patch with serious implications for folks who weren't paying attention. You might recall that quite a few questionable SSL certificates issued by Symantec Corporation's PKI began to surface early last year. Apparently, Symantec had subcontracted the creation of certificates without providing a whole lot of oversight. Long story short, the Chrome team decided the best course of action with respect to these potentially bogus (and security-threatening) SSL certificates was to set an "end of life" for accepting them as secure. They set Chrome 66 as the cutoff.
So, when Chrome 66 rolled out (an automatic, transparent update for pretty much everyone), suddenly any site running HTTPS on one of these certificates would no longer be considered secure. That's a major problem if the certificate in question is for our primary domain, but it's also a problem it's for a CDN we're using. You see, my server may be running on a valid SSL certificate, but if I have my assets—images, CSS, JavaScript—hosted on a CDN that is not secure, browsers will block those resources. It's like CSS Naked Day all over again.
To be completely honest, I wasn't really paying attention to this until Michael Spellacy looped me in on Twitter. Two hundred of his employer's sites were instantly reduced to plain old semantic HTML. No CSS. No images. No JavaScript.
The second incident was actually quite similar in that it also involved SSL, and specifically the expiration of an SSL certificate being used by jQuery's CDN. If a site relied on that CDN to serve an HTTPS-hosted version of jQuery, their users wouldn't have received it. And if that site was dependent on jQuery to be usable ... well, ouch!
It can be easy to shrug off news like this. Surely we'd make smarter implementation decisions if we were in charge. We'd certainly have included a local copy of jQuery like the good Boilerplate tells us to. The thing is, even with that extra bit of protection in place, we're falling for one of the most attractive fallacies when it comes to building for the web: that we have control.
Source: http://alistapart.com/article/the-illusion-of-control-in-web-design
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday May 09 2018, @11:12AM
I remember those who were the strongest anti-"tag soup" campaigners (complainers?), are now the largest spewers of "div/class"-soup, where none of the content has any type that describes what it is at all, and only classes tell the browser how and where to render it so that it looks like a what it is, which is a <table>, for instance. When used for simply laying things out in columns, that's *worse* than using a <table>, one of the much-maligned traps of early webpage design, because at least in the tables the cells had an explicit before/after/above/below relation to each other in the structure of the document - now they are totally at the mercy of whatever stylesheet is active - you could reverse the order of the columns by dicking around with a stylesheet, for example.
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