The Right Stuff

Whenever you append a query string to an URL, it's a best practice to URL-encode the query string value. On the server side encoding can be done by three methods of the System.Web.HttpUtility class, depending on the desired output.

Here's an example passing "Encoding Test: abcäöüß" to the methods:

The single method HttpUtility.UrlDecode() decodes all encoded query strings.

On the client side there are JavaScript functions to encode and decode query strings, namely escape() and unescape(). However, these functions have problems with the correct encoding of UTF-8 strings.

Today I had the same problem described in the article above while debugging search in dasBlog, which uses UTF-8 as the default request and response encoding. You can enable UTF-8 for any ASP.NET web site by including the following element in your web.config.

<globalization requestEncoding="utf-8" responseEncoding="utf-8" />

All search queries containing umlauts were retrieved without umlauts on the server side, so a query for König would result in Knig. The solution was to leverage the newer encoding functions encodeURIComponent() and decodeURIComponent() respectively which handle Unicode.

If you're interested in encoding in general I recommend Scott Hanselman's excellent podcast on globalization and internationalization. It gives a good overview without diving too deep into the details.

By the way, I recommend having a look at QuickRef.org, I really like their fast Ajax-enabled search engine for references of C, C++, CSS, HTML, HTML DOM, Java, JavaScript, MySQL, Perl, PHP and Ruby.

Now playing: New Order - Get ready - Vicious streak

I found a nice quote that describes my feelings about Firefox pretty well. Who needs IE 7?

More than anything else, this is the smartest aspect of what Mozilla has done with Firefox: It's a realistic browser, a worthy successor to the Navigator line. It's a browser that inspires an emotional response. You don't have to learn to like it with your left brain; you just like it.

I didn't know this is possible, but Firefox actually supports automatic NTLM authentication for certain domains. Whereas there's a global setting in IE to enable Windows Integrated Authentication, you'll have to enable NTLM authentication in Firefox on a per-domain basis.

This is especially useful if you are browsing intranet sites using Firefox that require NTLM authentication. In this case Firefox will bug you with a username/password dialog when accessing the site unless the domain isn't whitelisted.

There are good reasons for explicit whitelisting:

By default, Mozilla rejects all SPNEGO challenges from a web server. This is to protect the user from the possibility of DNS-spoofing being used to stage a man-in-the-middle exploit (see bug 17578 for more info). Moreover, with Windows clients NTLM may be negotiated as the authentication protocol. So, it is paramount that the browser does not freely exchange NTLM user credentials with any server that requests them. The NTLM response includes a hash of the user's logon credentials. On older versions of Windows this hash is computed using a relatively weak algorithm (see Hertel for more info on NTLM authentication).

[Via Dare Obasanjo]

Now playing: Big Bud - Fear of flying - Rice'n'beans

The last weeks I've been totally blown away by the Firefox user experience. Not only that it is a fast and standards-compliant browser, there is a vast list of extensions out there to tailor the browser to your needs. All plugins I've seen so far work and are updateable in non-admin environments. One may think I am an extension junkie, but see for yourself.

Some days ago Gunnar recommended the Yahoo! Widget Engine to me. I've decided to give it a try and I am pretty happy so far. The volume control widget even replaced the volume control that comes with my sound card. As I use the volume control fairy often, I like it to be visible on top of other applications. The widget engine allows just this by setting "on top" in the widget's properties. Add a little transparency and you're done. I've decided to place the widget in the lower right corner of the screen. However, Firefox has some controls placed there that aren't clickable because the widget sits on top of them.

Firefox won't be Firefox if there were no means of moving the controls out of the way and thus giving access to both the Firefox buttons and volume control: There is the possibility of placing a userChrome.css file inside the Firefox user profile under C:\Documents and Settings\<User Name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<Random Number>.default\chrome\. Using this CSS stylesheet, it's possible to control any aspect of the browser appearance.

/*
 * Do not remove the @namespace line -- it's required for correct functioning
 */
/* set default namespace to XUL */
@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");

/*
 * Pad the status bar from the right if Firefox is maximized to display Yahoo's
 * volume control widget without underlying Firefox controls.
 */
#main-window[sizemode="maximized"] #status-bar {
  padding-right: 172px !important;
}

Once the above file sits in in the profile directory, each time Firefox is maximized the status bar is indented 172 pixels from the right.

I was surprised to see that I was able to put the stylesheet together in about 5 minutes. There's plenty of documentation and samples on the web regarding XUL applications, and Firefox is one.

Now playing: Ethereal 77 - Landscapes - Baltica

Finally, I found some extensions that enables Firefox tabbed browsing behaving similar to Maxthon:

• Super DragAndGo
  Simply drag a link to open it in a new tab or drag selected text on the page to open a web search using the default search engine. An absolute must-have!
• Focus Last Selected Tab
  After closing a tab, the previously active tab is selected. Without this extension the left-handed tab of the closed one is selected instead.
• Tab Clicking Options
  Enables close-on-doubleclick and the like.
• Tab Catalog
  Shows previews of opened tabs.
• Undo Close Tab
  Re-opens the last closed tab. Not as powerful as Maxthon's Undo functionality as it has no history. Still better than nothing.

Some more plugins I've installed:

• Image Zoom
  Zooms images using the mouse wheel.
• SmoothWheel
  For softer scrolling.
• TinyURL Creator
  Leverages TinyURL.com to shorten long URLs. For instance, http://tinyurl.com/ayv6r points to this article. Compare the short URL to the URL shown in your address bar to see the difference.
• Open Long URL
  Opens long URLs spanning multiple lines as received in e-mail messages.

Now playing: Supergrass - Road to Rouen - Kick in the teeth