How to check something isn't an email address?


The HTML5 Logo.

In web-development circles, it is a well-known fact that trying to validate an email using a regular expression is… complex. The full set of modern email standards allows for such wonderful addresses as: chief.o'brien+ds9@spásárthach.भारत So determining whether or not your user has entered a valid email address becomes an ever-increasing challenge. But what if you […]

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I think I kind of hate lazy loading


An icon representing a broken image.

Yesterday I was on a train. I clicked on a link and my browser loaded a long article for me to read. Halfway through reading it, the train went into a tunnel and I lost signal. That meant I couldn't see the images on the other half of the page for the rest of the […]

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This link is only available by keyboard navigation


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There's a link, right here ➡️⬅️ but, if you're on a touchscreen, you can't tap on it. Using a mouse? Nope, that won't work either. The only way to navigate to it is via keyboard navigation. Hit your Tab ⭾ button! There's a little bit of me wants to build an entire website which can […]

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Can this device make a phone call?


The Doctor holding Ryan's phone.

I want to detect if a web browser is running on a device which is capable of placing a telephone call. Is that possible? I'm going to go with a cautious "no - not quite". Although there are several proxies which get you part of the way there. Here's a link to a telephone number […]

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Does AI mean we don't need the Semantic Web?


User: Read the following sentence: "Our opening hours are: Weekdays 10 until 7. Weekend 10 until 10 (Early closing 9 o'clock Sunday)." ChatGPT: The given sentence states the opening hours of a certain establishment. Here is the breakdown of the opening hours mentioned: Weekdays: The establishment is open from 10 in the morning until 7 in the evening. Weekend: On weekends, the establishment is open from 10 in the morning until 10 at night. Early closing on Sunday: On Sundays, the establishment closes earlier than usual, at 9 o'clock in the evening. Please note that this information is based solely on the provided sentence, and the specific establishment or its type is not mentioned. User: Is the establishment open at 2130 on Sunday? ChatGPT: Based on the information provided in the sentence, the establishment has early closing on Sunday, with the closing time set at 9 o'clock in the evening. Therefore, the establishment would not be open at 21:30 (or 9:30 PM) on Sunday.

If you hang around with computerists long enough, they start talking about the Semantic Web. If you can represent human knowledge in a way that's easy for computers to understand it will be transformative for information processing. But computers, traditionally, haven't been very good at parsing ambiguous human text. Suppose you saw this text written […]

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The limits of CSS styling select options


Checkboxes in a line.

Sometimes you learn the most from failures! I wanted a <select multiple> element where the <options> were laid out in a grid. I nearly got there. It's possible to have the <option>s in a horizontal row - but only on Chrome and Firefox. Here's a quick fiddle showing the results: As you can see, it's […]

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Responsive Yearly Calendar with Flexbox


A grid of calendars. One calendar item has moved to the next line.

This blog has a calendar showing my yearly archives. It was in a table layout - which made sense when I first designed it - but had a few spacing niggles and was hard to make responsive. Now, it behaves like this: The code is relatively straightforward. The HTML for the calendar looks like this: […]

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How to password protect a static HTML page with no JS


Screenshot of some garbled text on screen.

I recently saw Robin Moisson's method of password protecting a statically served HTML page. It's quite neat! But it does rely on JavaScript. That got me wondering if there was a way to encrypt a static page only using CSS? And... I think I've done it! I'll warn you now, this is a deeply stupid […]

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What's the most malicious thing you can do with an injected HTML heading element?


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A bit of a thought experiment - similar to my Minimum Viable XSS and SVG injection investigations. I recently found a popular website which echoed back user input. It correctly sanitised < to &lt; to prevent any HTML injection. Except… It let through <h2> elements unaltered! Why? I suspect because the output was: <h2>Your search […]

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Simultaneous Translation in HTML


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How do you show two languages simultaneously in HTML? If you want to show text in a foreign language, the markup is simple: <html lang="en-GB"> ... As Caesar said: <i lang="la">veni vidi vici</i> That says the page is in British English (en-GB) but the specific phrase is in Latin (la). But how can you offer […]

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