Website Design
Javascript, Add-ons and other stuff
Javascript and PHP are basically coding languages that allow programs to run inside of and from web pages. One of the major reasons to use code inside a browser application is the Cookie. You either love 'Cookies' or you hate them. Cookies are little bits of code written by some of these scripting languages which are stored on visitors computers. Some applications like online banking will not work if you have Cookies switched off as they store information needed for security purposes. We use Firefox as our preferred browser - and tell the 'fox' to delete all cookies whenever we exit the browser. If you insist on using Internet Exploder, then that's fine, if you want to upgrade your browsing experience then you can download Firefox at the Firefox website.
As we have said in various other sections of this site, a web site is a document. This document should be usable in other business areas and if it is full of Javascript code then that just isn't going to happen. Some visitors will set their browsers to ignore Javascript, others may have browsers that can not run Javascript.
Javascript code can be a security risk - see the article supplied by McGraw-Hill/Osborne at the Devarticles web site for more information on the Javascript security issues.
We try and restrict the use of Javascript to a bare minimum. Our contact page uses a JavaScript encryption routine to try and outwit the nasty spammers who search through the internet looking for valid email addresses to attack. We don't like Javascript, but we do recommend clients uses our encrypted email address code to try and protect themselves against Spammers.
PHP scripts can be even more of a security risk, Badly written PHP can expose the client's server to very damaging attacks. In extreme cases these root password could be obtained and the it's 'game over' for that server. Most of our clients do not run their own web servers, so security is handled by the commercial hosting company, but these companies would soon ask you to take your business elsewhere if you were to expose them to dangerous PHP scripts. This site does use PHP scripting so that we can demonstrate the flexibility of CSS switching. We need to be able to write to a cookie on our visitors PC so that we can keep track of their selected style. The PHP Security Organisation has more information on their website.