Here's one for the holiday season ...

This has happened to me a few times already after I log into the Apple Developer Connection site. I thought I'd share this moment of wonderful communication with a website user:

My friend JR pointed me to this trick which is detailed in RFC 2557

It turns out that by using a special data: URL scheme you are able to embed any mime data inside a HTML page, the format is as follows:

data:<mimetype>;base64,<data>

<mimetype> needs to be replaced by the mime-type of your data (image/png for instance) and
<data> is the base64 encoded string of the actual bytes of the file.

For instance, look at the source of the image below, or simply click on it and look at the URL in your browser's location bar.

This technique works in Firefox, Safari, Konqueror and Opera. I think it has great potential! Sadly I can't get it to work in Internet Explorer.
I already can imagine very useful applications for this: captcha images, image uploads in blog posts, ...

We got complaints from users of Bamboo that after posting a new forum message, they weren't brought to their recently posted message but to the first message in the thread instead. We were completely baffled since it worked perfectly in FireFox, and all we did was redirect to:

/forum/list/messages?topicid=1159&offset=75#goto_6362

Nothing extraordinary there, right?

Well, that's forgetting about Internet Explorer's ability to introduce bugs in even the most trivial areas. Instead of providing these parameters to the web application:

topicid=1159
offset=75

It manages to not strip off the anchor and provides these parameters instead:

topicid=1159
offset=75#goto_6362

I thus inded up handling this directly in RIFE. When the sendRedirect(String url) method is called, it checks for the user agent and if it's Internet Explorer and the URL contains an anchor, it does a refresh instead of a redirect. This shows a white screen to Internet Explorer users for a small moment, but it's the only way we've found around this bug.

Again, Microsoft was able to suck up about 4 hours of my time, without me getting paid anything. It's about time people that start to talk about Windows and Internet Explorer not only being less productive than MacOSX or Linux, but even people that don't use the applications themselves are forced to handle the stupidities that lurk inside.

I just noticed today that when you're receive an like this at the server-side:

/reply/message#lastmessage

and you redirect to this URL with a 302 'Permanently moved' response:

/list/messages?topicid=1152&offset=0

Some browsers automatically add the #lastmessage anchor after the URL. Both Mozilla and Opera do this, but Konqueror doesn't.

Very weird behaviour!