Simon Pieters

Web standards engineer @mozilla@mozilla.social
✍️ htmlparser.info & wpc.guide

Simon Pieterszcorpan
2025-06-25
Simon Pieterszcorpan
2025-06-23

@securitymb Right. But script and style are actual SVG elements so those are likely most risky compat-wise.

Elements or character references or CDATA sections, or even comments.

Simon Pieterszcorpan
2025-06-18

@asuh @keithamus @bramus can you expand on why widows & orphans? Do you want them for print or multicol?

Simon Pieters boosted:
2025-06-16

If you use "AI agents" (LLMs calling tools in a loop) you need to be aware of the Lethal Trifecta

Any time you combine access to private data, exposure to untrusted content and the ability to externally communicate an attacker can trick the system into stealing your data simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/

Simon Pieterszcorpan
2025-06-16

@securitymb

> While there’s currently no proposal that addresses this issue, the Google Information Security Engineering team is planning to explore options to fix this vector as well.

Let's do it. I've written about improving consistency in parsing before: x.com/zcorpan/status/133951714

Although making SVG style and script tokenize like HTML doesn't necessarily solve mXSS, it seems like an improvement. Removing the scripting enabled check for noscript is another, but it would break the feature.

Simon Pieters boosted:
Michał Bentkowski (@SecurityMB) 🦻securitymb@infosec.exchange
2025-06-16

Today we published two blog posts about an HTML specification change that makes mutation XSS harder to exploit! Long story short: `<` and `>` are now escaped in attributes.

* Blog post about security rationale behind this change: bughunters.google.com/blog/503
* Blog post about how it affects web developers: developer.chrome.com/blog/esca

Simon Pieters boosted:
Cure53 🏳️‍🌈cure53@infosec.exchange
2025-06-03

Remember this tiny change to the HTML spec?

It just prevented a critical bug in an application we are currently testing.

github.com/whatwg/html/commit/

❤️ cc @freddy @securitymb

Simon Pieterszcorpan
2025-06-03
Simon Pieterszcorpan
2025-04-25

@bkardell @Schepp @timsev @Kilian @keithamus there was pushback to implement the a11y mapping in 2014, see w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cg

In 2019, Firefox implemented (in Nightly only) the outline algorithm and found that it regressed usability for various existing content:
github.com/whatwg/html/pull/34
bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.

That I think was the nail in the coffin for the outline algorithm.

Simon Pieterszcorpan
2025-04-11

@eeeps thank you or thank you

Simon Pieterszcorpan
2025-04-11

I wrote an article that was #1 on the orange website for a bit earlier today

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4

Simon Pieterszcorpan
2025-03-27

Starting March 31, 50% of Firefox beta 138 users will have the change where <h1> always has the same UA style, even in article, aside, nav, section.

Also, Lighthouse will fail a check if you have an <h1> without font-size specified.

Advice for web developers: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/do

Context: mastodon.social/@zcorpan/11383

Simon Pieterszcorpan
2025-03-04

@eeeps @johannes it seems possible. Though changing object-fit would need to be a relevant mutation. File an issue 🙂

Simon Pieters boosted:
2025-02-24

Last week I did a little talk on the brand new command&commandfor attributes! And you can watch it right here:

londonwebstandards.org/talks/e

Simon Pieters boosted:
Henri Sivonenhsivonen
2025-01-17

Our team (DOM Core) has an open position: mozilla.org/en-US/careers/posi

Remote in any of Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Germany, UK, Canada, or US.

Simon Pieters boosted:
Simon Jonessimonrjones
2025-01-17

@zcorpan @rem Actually if you reach out to Google Help and ask them if you can disable Gemini services on your Workspace account, they will help you do this (after being connected to a few different support agents).

I now have options in Google Admin > Generative AI > Gemini for Google Workspace settings to enable / disable for services such as Google Docs, Meet, GMail.

Simon Pieterszcorpan
2025-01-17

@rem ability to turn it off is only available on Enterprise 🙃

(This is a joke, but it might be true.)

Simon Pieterszcorpan
2025-01-17

@mb21 Yes. See compat analysis at github.com/whatwg/html/issues/
and
github.com/whatwg/html/issues/

While some will look worse, there are also some that will look better or as intended with the change.

Firefox Nightly has shipped this for ~10 months and we have only received one bug report about a regressed site, and that site was quickly fixed.

Simon Pieterszcorpan
2025-01-16

- The automatic heading level (a.k.a. the outline algorithm) was dropped from the spec, but the default UA stylesheet remained. This is what we're trying to remove now.

Simon Pieterszcorpan
2025-01-16

- The default rendering was implemented in browsers, but not the heading level in the accessibility tree.
- Websites started to use sectioning elements, but didn't expect automatic heading levels. It was not possible for browsers to change that without breaking user expectations.

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