Made the mistake of looking back today.

Sun Oct 31 03:03:26 2004 UTC
Tue Nov 13 14:04:08 2007 UTC

Didn't realize it was that long.

One of the major things that really bugs me about the web is how poor the average web programmer handles strings. Here we are, changing the way the world works on top of text based protocols and languages like HTTP, MIME, JavaScript and CSS, yet some of the biggest issues that still plague us are cross-site scripting and mangled text due to aggressive filtering, mismatched encodings or overzealous escaping.

Almost two years ago I said I'd write down some formal notes on how to avoid issues like XSS, but I never actually posted anything. See, once I sat down to actually try and untangle the do's and don'ts, I found it extremely hard to build up a big coherent picture.

But here we are now, and I'm going to try anyway. The text is aimed at people who have had to deal with these issues, who are looking for a bit of formalism to frame their own solutions in.

After reading a lot of praise over the past few months, I finally got the chance to watch last year's Ben X. This Belgian film tells the story of an autistic boy who uses online gaming to escape from the harsh realities of his daily life. It's in my opinion of the most impressive films to come out of my tiny little home country in many years.

The design is meant to look like the cover of a board game box and accompanies the web site's design.

I finished designing and building this year's edition of LeuvenSpeelt.be, a site that promotes student theater at my old university. You can read about the background in my previous blog posts.

The site is a simple Drupal installation with heavy content and theme work. The design is heavy on graphics and built as an experimental semi-fluid layout that adapts to different screen resolutions. Peripheral design elements are shifted in or out of the browser frame to make more space for content as needed.

Tools used: Photoshop, Illustrator, 3D Studio Max, TextMate. Uses the beautiful Fontin font available freely from Jos Buivenga's exljbris foundry.

And no, no easter eggs this year.

Various people have prodded me to explain my recent involvement in Drupal, or rather the lack of it. Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to do so in a way that is constructive and tactful, especially not when it comes to other contributors. Like Soylent Green, Open Source is made of people, and it's these people who are at the basis of a mountain of frustration that has driven me off.