Tuesday, February 10th, 2009
Welcome back to "This Week in HTML 5," where I'll try to summarize the major activity in the ongoing standards process in the WHATWG and W3C HTML Working Group.
The big news this week is more major work on the non-normative section on rendering HTML documents, including a lot of reverse-engineered documentation of legacy (invalid) attributes that users expect browsers to support.
- r2749:
marginwidth and marginheight attributes on the <body> element
- r2750:
hspace and vspace attributes on <table>
- r2751: the
bgcolor attribute
- r2752: the
<font> element
- r2753: the
frames and rules attributes of <table>
- r2757: embedded content such as
<audio>, <video>, <embed>, <iframe>, and <canvas>
- r2759: laying out a group of
<frame>s within a <frameset>
- r2760: the
<br> element
- r2761: default margins on
<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, <h6>, and <figure>
- r2762:
<bb>, <button>, and <details> elements
- r2763: the
<hr> element (this change in particular has some WHATWG members very excited)
- r2764: the
<fieldset> element
- r2765:
<input type=text>
- r2766:
<input type=date>, <input type=range>, and <input type=color>
- r2767:
<input type=checkbox>, <input type=radio>, <input type=file>, <input type=submit>, <input type=reset>, and <input type=button>
- r2768:
<select>, <progress>, and <meter>
- r2769:
<textarea>
- r2770:
<mark>
- r2772: printing HTML documents
- r2773:
<link> elements
In addition, one major section was dropped from HTML 5 this week: an algorithm for determining what object is under the cursor (presuming, of course, that the cursor is within the region of the screen which contains an HTML document, and the current context has a screen, and the current context has a cursor). Ian Hickson has announced on www-style that, in accordance with that group's consensus, the algorithm would be better maintained in a future CSS specification.
Around the web:
Tune in next week for another exciting episode of "This Week in HTML 5."
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Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
Welcome back to "This Week in HTML 5," where I'll try to summarize the major activity in the ongoing standards process in the WHATWG and W3C HTML Working Group.
It's time to catch up on the myriad of changes to the HTML 5 spec. The big news this week is the continued merging of Web Forms 2 into HTML 5.
<button> [r2280]<select> [r2285, r2287, r2288, r2290]<input type="submit"> [r2269]<input type="reset"> [r2270]<input type="button"> [r2271]<input type="image"> [r2276]<input type="file">> [r2274]<input type="checkbox"> [r2257, r2258]<input type="radio"> [r2259]<input type="hidden"> [r2268]<input type="email"> [r2227]<input type="url"> [r2228, r2231, r2235]<input type="number"> [r2254]<input type="range"> [r2255]<input type="date"> [r2252]<input type="time"> [r2253]<input type="datetime"> [r2229, r2230, r2231, r2239, 2243, r2247, r2251]<input type="week"> [r2252]<input type="month"> [r2252]<input type="datetime-local"> [r2249]
In other news, Andy Lyttle wants to standardize one particular feature of <input type="search"> (which is already supported by Safari, but not standardized): placeholder text for input fields. The text would initially display in the input field (possibly in a stylized form, smaller font, or lighter color), then disappear when the field receives focus. Lots of sites use Javascript to achieve this effect, but it is surprisingly difficult to get right, in part because no one can quite agree on exactly how it should work. Mozilla Firefox displays the name of your current search engine in its dedicated search box until you focus the search box, at which point it blanks out and allows you to type. Safari's search box is initially blank (at least on Windows), and only displays the name of your default search engine after it has received focus and lost it again. Google Chrome's "omnibox" displays "Type to search", right-justified, even when the omnibox has focus, then removes it after you've typed a single character. Adding an <input placeholder> attribute would allow each browser on each platform to match their users' expectations (and possibly even allow end-user customization) of how placeholder text should work for web forms. Discussion threads: 1, 2, 3. So far, there is no consensus on whether this should be added to HTML 5, or what the markup would look like.
Other interesting changes this week:
- r2273 defines the
<input required> attribute.
- r2272 defines what it means to "activate" a form field, so that "clicking a button" and "setting focus to the button and pressing space" result in the same
click event being triggered.
- r2277 defines the
<input size> attribute, which controls the displayed size of the field (but not the length of the field's value, that's <input maxlength> [r2233]).
- r2278 defines the
<input pattern> attribute, which is an arbitrary regular expression against which the field's value should be matched.
- r2282 defines the
input and change events. The input event occurs during typing in a form field (and therefore may trigger multiple times as the user types); the change event triggers when a change is committed, even if typing was not involved (such as choosing files to upload with an <input type="file"> field.
- r2242 tweaks the definition of floating point numbers to allow specifying an exponent.
Around the web:
- Following up on last week's article on clickjacking, the security researcher who discovered (and named) it has posted details of his discovery. Short version: it's even worse than we thought, but vendors are working on it. Here's a proof-of-concept against Adobe Flash that, quite literally, spys on you (via your webcam) without the usual warning dialogs; here's Adobe's response. NoScript now offers enhanced protection against some clickjacking attack vectors.
- Anne van Kesteren gives an update on IE 8's support for HTML 5 and other emerging standards.
- Matt Ryall has a good article on HTML 5, headings and sections, which documents the differences between HTML 4 and 5's header elements. My personal opinion: I once wrote a 500 page book in Docbook, a non-HTML markup language for technical writers. Docbook 3 had separate elements for
<sect1>, <sect2>, <sect3>, &c, and it was a massive pain in the ass to cut-and-paste sections, or try to reuse them in different documents. Docbook 4 added a generic <section> element which can be nested indefinitely, and all those problems went away. Lots of web authors copy-and-paste HTML markup; anything that helps that "just work" is a good thing.
Tune in next week for another exciting episode of "This Week in HTML 5."
Posted in Weekly Review | 6 Comments »
Monday, September 29th, 2008
Welcome back to "This Week in HTML 5," where I'll try to summarize the major activity in the ongoing standards process in the WHATWG and W3C HTML Working Group.
Work continued this week on Web Forms 2, but I'm going to hold off on that until next week. And in case you missed it, Ian Hickson gave a tech talk on HTML 5, including live demos of some features recently implemented in nightly browser builds.
The big news this week is the disclosure of a vulnerability that researchers have dubbed "clickjacking." To understand it, start with Giorgio Maone's post, Clickjacking and NoScript. Giorgio is the author of the popular NoScript extension for Firefox. In its default configuration, NoScript protects against this vulnerability on most sites in most situations; you can configure it to defeat the attack entirely, but only at the cost of usability and functionality.
Of course, most web users do not run Firefox, and fewer still run NoScript, so web developers still need to be aware of it. Michal Zalewski's post, Dealing with UI redress vulnerabilities inherent to the current web, addresses some possible workarounds:
- Using Javascript hacks to detect that
window.top != window to inhibit rendering, or override window.top.location. These mechanisms work only if Javascript is enabled, however, and are not guaranteed to be reliable or future-safe. If the check is carried on every UI click, performance penalties apply, too. Not to mention, the extra complexity is just counterintuitive and weird.
- Requiring non-trivial reauthentication (captcha, password reentry) on all UI actions with any potential for abuse. Although this is acceptable for certain critical operations, doing so every time a person adds Bob as a friend on a social networking site, or deletes a single mail in a webmail system, is very impractical.
Worried yet? Now let's turn to the question of what browser vendors can do to mitigate the vulnerability. Michal offers several proposals. It is important to realize that none of these proposals have been implemented yet, so don't go rushing off to your text editor and expecting them to do something useful.
- Create a HTTP-level (or HTTP-EQUIV) mechanism along the lines of "X-I-Do-Not-Want-To-Be-Framed-Across-Domains: yes" that permits a web page to inhibit frame rendering in potentially dangerous situations.
- Add a document-level mechanism to make "if nested <show this> else <show that>" conditionals possible without Javascript. One proposal is to do this on the level of CSS (by using either the media-dependency features of CSS or special classes); another is to introduce new HTML tags. This would make it possible for pages to defend themselves even in environments where Javascript is disabled or limited.
- Add an on-by-default mechanism that prevents UI actions to be taken when a document tries to obstruct portions of a non-same-origin frame. By carefully designing the mechanism, we can prevent legitimate uses (such as dynamic menus that overlap with advertisements, gadgets, etc) from being affected, yet achieve a high reliability in stopping attacks.
- Enforce a click-to-work mechanism (resembling the Eolas patent workaround) for all cross-domain IFRAMEs.
- Rework everything we know about HTML / browser security models to make it possible for domains and pages to specify very specific opt-in / opt-out policies for all types of linking, referencing, such that countering UI redress attacks would be just one of the cases controlled by this mechanism.
To this list, Colin Jackson added two more suggestions:
- New cookie attribute: The "httpOnly" cookie flag allows sites to put restrictions on how a cookie can be accessed. We could allow a new flag to be specified in the Set-Cookie header that is designed to prevent CSRF and "UI redress" attacks. If a cookie is set with a "sameOrigin" flag, we could prevent that cookie from being sent on HTTP requests that are initiated by other origins, or were made by frames with ancestors of other origins. In a CSRF or "UI redress" attack scenario, it will appear as though the user is not logged in, and thus the HTTP request will be unable to affect the user's account.
- New HTTP request header: Browser vendors seem to be moving away from "same origin restrictions" towards "verifiable origin labels" that let the site decide whether two security origins trust each other. ... [I]nstead of making it an "X-I-Do-Not-Want-To-Be-Framed-Across-Domains: yes" HTTP response header, make it an "X-Ancestor-Frame-Origin: http://www.evil.com" HTTP request header. This header could be a list of all the origins that are ancestors of the frame that triggered the request. If the site decides it does not like the ancestor frame origin it could reject the request. This could be added as a property of MessageEvent as well to detect client-side-only UI redress attacks.
This last approach moves us down a slippery slope towards site security policies for IFRAMEs and embedded content, similar to the Flash security model that allows trusted sites to access cross-domain resources. In practice, Flash crossdomain.xml files have a number of problems, and such an approach would still only cover a fraction of the possible use cases.
You can read the full thread for all the gory details and back-and-forth among browser vendors (Maciej Stachowiak works on WebKit, Robert O'Callahan works on Firefox) and other interested parties. As Maciej notes, user experience may suffer: "[Under proposal #3] iGoogle widgets would become disabled if scrolled partially off the top of the page under your proposal. And even if scrolled back into view, would remain disabled for a second. With possibly a jarring visual effect, or alternately, no visual indication that they are disabled. Hard to decide which is worse." As Rob notes, any solution will also need to deal with IFRAMEs styled with opacity:0, related attacks using some little-known (but widely supported) capabilities of SVG, and possibly other vectors that the world collectively hasn't figured out yet. If you're getting a mental image of the game "Whack-a-Mole," you're not alone.
Ironically, the best example of "clickjacking" is the download page for the NoScript extension, which uses it for good rather than evil. Thanks to some fancy JavaScript (search for "installer"), Giorgio embeds the addons.mozilla.org download page for NoScript in an IFRAME on his own page on noscript.net, sets the IFRAME to "opacity:0" (an attack vector that Robert O'Callahan specifically warned about), scrolls the embedded addons.mozilla.org page to the top corner of its "Add to Firefox" button, and sets the z-index of the IFRAME to 100. Thus, the IFRAME is floating (due to "z-index:100") invisibly (due to "opacity:0") over Giorgio's own "Install Now" button (due to the positioning of the IFRAME element itself). When you think you're clicking the button on noscript.net you are actually clicking the button on addons.mozilla.org. What's the difference? By default, Firefox treats addons.mozilla.org as a trusted download site, so it immediately pops up the extension installation dialog instead of blocking the installation with an infobar saying "Firefox prevented this site (noscript.net) from installing software on your computer." From a user experience standpoint, this is great -- one less click to download and install an extension. From a security standpoint, this is incredibly scary -- the end user has no idea they're interacting with a third-party site.
Ian Hickson, the editor of HTML 5, weighed in with his opinion:
I would like feedback from browser vendors on this topic, ideally in the form of experimental implementations. Personally I think the idea of disabling the contents of a cross-origin iframe that has been partially obscured or rendered partially off-screen is the best idea, but whether we can adopt it depends somewhat on whether browser vendors are willing to adopt it and implement it. It requires no standards changes to implement.
Tune in next week for another exciting episode of "This Week in HTML 5."
Posted in Weekly Review | 9 Comments »