Posts by g_mannings

Just to be pinickity

I don't often comment, however this article got to me. Was it the subject matter? Was it the journalist's understanding that no email should ever be sent through another email system, even if a CAPTCHA (that is completely breakable) is used without some form of safeguard? No, it was neither of these things, it was the blatant attack on PHP that I found offensive.

How did the journalist come to the conclusion that the form in question causing the problem was PHP and this required talking about? Was it an assumption because much of the site was written in PHP? Would the article have struggled to hit the wordcount if it wasn't PHP?

From my cursory glance at the website this seems to be a badly put together front end* where every link that points to a definite PHP element refers to it with the extension .php. As the form doesn't reference a script with this attribute then we can't assume that the script in question is PHP, it may have been something the site designer inherited in a different language, does this make it excusable? No.

If the site designer chose to add this 'feature' to the site then please with all journalistic endeavour illustrate this as the issue, don't blame the language that the developer used for this site embellishment as the issue.

There is the possibility that the form used on the website is referencing something in the backend written in C, Perl or even ASP, no matter how unlikely, and ultimately that the fault lies not with the programming language but with the BAD THOUGHT PROCESS BEHIND THE FORM. No matter what language, or the addition of a CAPTCHA , are going to stop miscreants from misusing such a system, to think so is naïve! Quite frankly, this sort of form is a bad idea, it should not be allowed on a public site.

To compound my point, HTML is inherently accessible, most user-agents can understand the DTD and alongside the educated use of elements and attributes that the W3C and WCAG have created guidelines for, that they should be almost automatic for most developers. In the case of this site, the accessibility levels fail quite dramatically, yet you wouldn't catch me writing an article saying that a site, written in HTML has caused a failure in accessibility, no its a problem with the developer writing the site NOT the choice of language.

I'm definitely not excusing the lacklustre creation of the website, the skipping of basic security methodology and especially not the front end coding which is, quite frankly, dreadful, however I do take offence when a journalist takes a thinly veiled swipe at a programming/scripting language because someone has done something stupid, just to fuel their own personal dislike or to start a flame war.

* If any website should comply with accessibility guidelines (and that's all of them by the way) it is that of a major government party and it should never, never use table for layout purposes, let alone not associate labels with form controls. There is also the issue of the page not working correctly with JavaScript disabled, an advertisement for unobtrusive JavaScript if there ever has been one, I could go on...