Let's Encrypt NearlyFreeSpeech.net Update

2016 Nov 5, 8:59

Since I had last posted about using Let's Encrypt with NearlyFreeSpeech, NFS has changed their process for setting TLS info. Instead of putting the various files in /home/protected/ssl and submitting an assistance request, now there is a command to submit the certificate info and a webpage for submitting the certificate info.

The webpage is https://members.nearlyfreespeech.net/{username}/sites/{sitename}/add_tls and has a textbox for you to paste in all the cert info in PEM form into the textbox. The domain key, the domain certificate, and the Let's Encrypt intermediate cert must be pasted into the textbox and submitted.

Alternatively, that same info may be provided as standard input to nfsn -i set-tls

To renew my certificate with the updated NFS process I followed the commands from Andrei Damian-Fekete's script which depends on acme_tiny.py:

python acme_tiny.py --account-key account.key --csr domain.csr --acme-dir /home/public/.well-known/acme-challenge/ > signed.crt
wget -O - https://letsencrypt.org/certs/lets-encrypt-x3-cross-signed.pem > intermediate.pem
cat domain.key signed.crt intermediate.pem > chained.pem
nfsn -i set-tls < chained.pem

Because my certificate had already expired I needed to comment out the section in acme_tiny.py that validates the challenge file. The filenames in the above map to the following:

signed.crt is the Let's Encrypt provided certificate
account.key is the user private key registered with LE
domain.csr is the cert request
domain.key is the key for the domain cert

Tweet from David_Risney

2015 Apr 9, 9:30

If only we had some mechanism to validate the integrity of http sessions. https://twitter.com/dangoodin001/status/586568133038579712 …

URI functions in Windows Store Applications

2013 Jul 25, 1:00

Summary

The Modern SDK contains some URI related functionality as do libraries available in particular projection languages. Unfortunately, collectively these APIs do not cover all scenarios in all languages. Specifically, JavaScript and C++ have no URI building APIs, and C++ additionally has no percent-encoding/decoding APIs.

	WinRT (JS and C++)	JS Only	C++ Only	.NET Only
Parse	Windows.Foundation.Uri		WsDecodeUrl*	System.Uri
Build			WsEncodeUrl*	System.UriBuilder
Normalize	Windows.Foundation.Uri			System.Uri
Equality	Windows.Foundation.Uri. Equals			System.Uri.Compare
Relative resolution	Windows.Foundation.Uri. CombineUri			System.Uri
Encode data for including in URI property	Windows.Foundation.Uri. EscapeComponent	encodeURIComponent	WsEncodeUrl*	System.Uri. EscapeDataString
Decode data extracted from URI property	Windows.Foundation.Uri. UnescapeComponent	decodeURIComponent	WsDecodeUrl*	System.Uri. UnescapeDataString
Build Query
Parse Query	Windows.Foundation. Uri.QueryParsed / Windows.Foundation. WwwFormUrlDecoder*

The Windows.Foudnation.Uri type is not projected into .NET modern applications. Instead those applications use System.Uri and the platform ensures that it is correctly converted back and forth between Windows.Foundation.Uri as appropriate. Accordingly the column marked WinRT above is applicable to JS and C++ modern applications but not .NET modern applications. The only entries above applicable to .NET are the .NET Only column and the WwwFormUrlDecoder in the bottom left which is available to .NET.

Scenarios

Parse

This functionality is provided by the WinRT API Windows.Foundation.Uri in C++ and JS, and by System.Uri in .NET.

Parsing a URI pulls it apart into its basic components without decoding or otherwise modifying the contents.

var uri = new Windows.Foundation.Uri("http://example.com/path%20segment1/path%20segment2?key1=value1&key2=value2");

console.log(uri.path);// /path%20segment1/path%20segment2

WsDecodeUrl (C++)

WsDecodeUrl is not suitable for general purpose URI parsing. Use Windows.Foundation.Uri instead.

Build (C#)

URI building is only available in C# via System.UriBuilder.

URI building is the inverse of URI parsing: URI building allows the developer to specify the value of basic components of a URI and the API assembles them into a URI.

To work around the lack of a URI building API developers will likely concatenate strings to form their URIs. This can lead to injection bugs if they don’t validate or encode their input properly, but if based on trusted or known input is unlikely to have issues.

Uri originalUri = new Uri("http://example.com/path1/?query");

UriBuilder uriBuilder = new UriBuilder(originalUri);

uriBuilder.Path = "/path2/";

Uri newUri = uriBuilder.Uri; // http://example.com/path2/?query

WsEncodeUrl (C++)

WsEncodeUrl, in addition to building a URI from components also does some encoding. It encodes non-US-ASCII characters as UTF8, the percent, and a subset of gen-delims based on the URI property: all :/?#[]@ are percent-encoded except :/@ in the path and :/?@ in query and fragment.

Accordingly, WsEncodeUrl is not suitable for general purpose URI building. It is acceptable to use in the following cases:

- You’re building a URI out of non-encoded URI properties and don’t care about the difference between encoded and decoded characters. For instance you’re the only one consuming the URI and you uniformly decode URI properties when consuming – for instance using WsDecodeUrl to consume the URI.

- You’re building a URI with URI properties that don’t contain any of the characters that WsEncodeUrl encodes.

Normalize

This functionality is provided by the WinRT API Windows.Foundation.Uri in C++ and JS and by System.Uri in .NET. Normalization is applied during construction of the Uri object.

URI normalization is the application of URI normalization rules (including DNS normalization, IDN normalization, percent-encoding normalization, etc.) to the input URI.

var normalizedUri = new Windows.Foundation.Uri("HTTP://EXAMPLE.COM/p%61th foo/");

console.log(normalizedUri.absoluteUri); // http://example.com/path%20foo/

This is modulo Win8 812823 in which the Windows.Foundation.Uri.AbsoluteUri property returns a normalized IRI not a normalized URI. This bug does not affect System.Uri.AbsoluteUri which returns a normalized URI.

Equality

This functionality is provided by the WinRT API Windows.Foundation.Uri in C++ and JS and by System.Uri in .NET.

URI equality determines if two URIs are equal or not necessarily equal.

var uri1 = new Windows.Foundation.Uri("HTTP://EXAMPLE.COM/p%61th foo/"),

uri2 = new Windows.Foundation.Uri("http://example.com/path%20foo/");

console.log(uri1.equals(uri2)); // true

Relative resolution

This functionality is provided by the WinRT API Windows.Foundation.Uri in C++ and JS and by System.Uri in .NET

Relative resolution is a function that given an absolute URI A and a relative URI B, produces a new absolute URI C. C is the combination of A and B in which the basic components specified in B override or combine with those in A under rules specified in RFC 3986.

var baseUri = new Windows.Foundation.Uri("http://example.com/index.html"),

relativeUri = "/path?query#fragment",

absoluteUri = baseUri.combineUri(relativeUri);

console.log(baseUri.absoluteUri); // http://example.com/index.html

console.log(absoluteUri.absoluteUri); // http://example.com/path?query#fragment

Encode data for including in URI property

This functionality is available in JavaScript via encodeURIComponent and in C# via System.Uri.EscapeDataString. Although the two methods mentioned above will suffice for this purpose, they do not perform exactly the same operation.

Additionally we now have Windows.Foundation.Uri.EscapeComponent in WinRT, which is available in JavaScript and C++ (not C# since it doesn’t have access to Windows.Foundation.Uri). This is also slightly different from the previously mentioned mechanisms but works best for this purpose.

Encoding data for inclusion in a URI property is necessary when constructing a URI from data. In all the above cases the developer is dealing with a URI or substrings of a URI and so the strings are all encoded as appropriate. For instance, in the parsing example the path contains “path%20segment1” and not “path segment1”. To construct a URI one must first construct the basic components of the URI which involves encoding the data. For example, if one wanted to include “path segment / example” in the path of a URI, one must percent-encode the ‘ ‘ since it is not allowed in a URI, as well as the ‘/’ since although it is allowed, it is a delimiter and won’t be interpreted as data unless encoded.

If a developer does not have this API provided they can write it themselves. Percent-encoding methods appear simple to write, but the difficult part is getting the set of characters to encode correct, as well as handling non-US-ASCII characters.

var uri = new Windows.Foundation.Uri("http://example.com" +

"/" + Windows.Foundation.Uri.escapeComponent("path segment / example") +

"?key=" + Windows.Foundation.Uri.escapeComponent("=&?#"));

console.log(uri.absoluteUri); // http://example.com/path%20segment%20%2F%20example?key=%3D%26%3F%23

WsEncodeUrl (C++)

In addition to building a URI from components, WsEncodeUrl also percent-encodes some characters. However the API is not recommend for this scenario given the particular set of characters that are encoded and the convoluted nature in which a developer would have to use this API in order to use it for this purpose.

There are no general purpose scenarios for which the characters WsEncodeUrl encodes make sense: encode the %, encode a subset of gen-delims but not also encode the sub-delims. For instance this could not replace encodeURIComponent in a C++ version of the following code snippet since if ‘value’ contained ‘&’ or ‘=’ (both sub-delims) they wouldn’t be encoded and would be confused for delimiters in the name value pairs in the query:

"http://example.com/?key=" + Windows.Foundation.Uri.escapeComponent(value)

Since WsEncodeUrl produces a string URI, to obtain the property they want to encode they’d need to parse the resulting URI. WsDecodeUrl won’t work because it decodes the property but Windows.Foundation.Uri doesn’t decode. Accordingly the developer could run their string through WsEncodeUrl then Windows.Foundation.Uri to extract the property.

Decode data extracted from URI property

This functionality is available in JavaScript via decodeURIComponent and in C# via System.Uri.UnescapeDataString. Although the two methods mentioned above will suffice for this purpose, they do not perform exactly the same operation.

Additionally we now also have Windows.Foundation.Uri.UnescapeComponent in WinRT, which is available in JavaScript and C++ (not C# since it doesn’t have access to Windows.Foundation.Uri). This is also slightly different from the previously mentioned mechanisms but works best for this purpose.

Decoding is necessary when extracting data from a parsed URI property. For example, if a URI query contains a series of name and value pairs delimited by ‘=’ between names and values, and by ‘&’ between pairs, one must first parse the query into name and value entries and then decode the values. It is necessary to make this an extra step separate from parsing the URI property so that sub-delimiters (in this case ‘&’ and ‘=’) that are encoded will be interpreted as data, and those that are decoded will be interpreted as delimiters.

If a developer does not have this API provided they can write it themselves. Percent-decoding methods appear simple to write, but have some tricky parts including correctly handling non-US-ASCII, and remembering not to decode .

In the following example, note that if unescapeComponent were called first, the encoded ‘&’ and ‘=’ would be decoded and interfere with the parsing of the name value pairs in the query.

var uri = new Windows.Foundation.Uri("http://example.com/?foo=bar&array=%5B%27%E3%84%93%27%2C%27%26%27%2C%27%3D%27%2C%27%23%27%5D");

uri.query.substr(1).split("&").forEach(

function (keyValueString) {

var keyValue = keyValueString.split("=");

console.log(Windows.Foundation.Uri.unescapeComponent(keyValue[0]) + ": " + Windows.Foundation.Uri.unescapeComponent(keyValue[1]));

// foo: bar

// array: ['ㄓ','&','=','#']

});

WsDecodeUrl (C++)

Since WsDecodeUrl decodes all percent-encoded octets it could be used for general purpose percent-decoding but it takes a URI so would require the dev to construct a stub URI around the string they want to decode. For example they could prefix “http:///#” to their string, run it through WsDecodeUrl and then extract the fragment property. It is convoluted but will work correctly.

Parse Query

The query of a URI is often encoded as application/x-www-form-urlencoded which is percent-encoded name value pairs delimited by ‘&’ between pairs and ‘=’ between corresponding names and values.

In WinRT we have a class to parse this form of encoding using Windows.Foundation.WwwFormUrlDecoder. The queryParsed property on the Windows.Foundation.Uri class is of this type and created with the query of its Uri:

var uri = Windows.Foundation.Uri("http://example.com/?foo=bar&array=%5B%27%E3%84%93%27%2C%27%26%27%2C%27%3D%27%2C%27%23%27%5D");

uri.queryParsed.forEach(

function (pair) {

console.log("name: " + pair.name + ", value: " + pair.value);

// name: foo, value: bar

// name: array, value: ['ㄓ','&','=','#']

});

console.log(uri.queryParsed.getFirstValueByName("array")); // ['ㄓ','&','=','#']

The QueryParsed property is only on Windows.Foundation.Uri and not System.Uri and accordingly is not available in .NET. However the Windows.Foundation.WwwFormUrlDecoder class is available in C# and can be used manually:

Uri uri = new Uri("http://example.com/?foo=bar&array=%5B%27%E3%84%93%27%2C%27%26%27%2C%27%3D%27%2C%27%23%27%5D");

WwwFormUrlDecoder decoder = new WwwFormUrlDecoder(uri.Query);

foreach (IWwwFormUrlDecoderEntry entry in decoder)

{

System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("name: " + entry.Name + ", value: " + entry.Value);

// name: foo, value: bar

// name: array, value: ['ㄓ','&','=','#']

}

Build Query

To build a query of name value pairs encoded as application/x-www-form-urlencoded there is no WinRT API to do this directly. Instead a developer must do this manually making use of the code described in “Encode data for including in URI property”.

In terms of public releases, this property is only in the RC and later builds.

For example in JavaScript a developer may write:

var uri = new Windows.Foundation.Uri("http://example.com/"),

query = "?" + Windows.Foundation.Uri.escapeComponent("array") + "=" + Windows.Foundation.Uri.escapeComponent("['ㄓ','&','=','#']");

console.log(uri.combine(new Windows.Foundation.Uri(query)).absoluteUri); // http://example.com/?array=%5B'%E3%84%93'%2C'%26'%2C'%3D'%2C'%23'%5D

c# c++ javascript technical uri windows windows-runtime windows-store

FireFox doesn't have innerText

2011 Nov 14, 12:34

I wrote my HTML against IE9 and continually validated with Chrome as I went. Afterward I tried it in FireFox and found out that FireFox has textContent whereas IE9 & Chrome have innerText

technical web web-browser firefox ie9 chrome ie innertext textcontent js html

Sam Ruby: First Polyglot Validator Check Deployed

2009 Sep 10, 7:22HTML validator can validate that your document is both HTML and XHTML at the same time.

html5 xhtml html validator technical web polyglot

Windows Internet Explorer Testing Center

2008 Mar 5, 9:50"In conjunction with the Beta 1 release of Internet Explorer 8, we are posting a set of tests we are using to validate our interpretation and implementation of the CSS 2.1 specification. We are doing this so we can get some feedback from you, the web desi

css test w3c microsoft msdn ie browser ie8

XSL Transforms in JavaScript

2007 Oct 7, 4:12In a previous post I mentioned an xsltproc like js file I made. As noted in that post, on Windows you can write console script files in JavaScript, name them foo.js, and execute them from the command prompt. I later found that MSDN has an XSLT javascript sample which looks similar to mine, but I like mine better for the XSLT parameter support and having a non-ridiculous way of interpreting filenames. The code for my xsltproc.js follows. The script is very simple and demonstrates the ease with which you can manipulate these system objects and all it takes is opening up notepad.

var createNewXMLObj = function() {
   var result = new ActiveXObject("MSXML2.FreeThreadedDOMDocument");
   result.validateOnParse = false;
   result.async = false;
   return result;
}

var args = WScript.arguments;
var ofs = WScript.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");

var xslParams = [];
var xmlStyle = null;
var xmlInput = null;
var inputFile = null;
var outputFile = null;
var error = false;

for (var idx = 0; idx < args.length && !error; ++idx)
   if (args.item(idx) == "-o") {
      if (idx + 1 < args.length) {
         outputFile = ofs.GetAbsolutePathName(args.item(idx + 1));
         ++idx;
      }
      else
         error = true;
   }
   else if (args.item(idx) == "--param" || args.item(idx) == "-param") {
      if (idx + 2 < args.length) {
         xslParams[args.item(idx + 1)] = args.item(idx + 2);
         idx += 2;
      }
      else
         error = true;
   }
   else if (xmlStyle == null) {
      xmlStyle = createNewXMLObj();
      xmlStyle.load(ofs.GetAbsolutePathName(args.item(idx)));
   }
   else if (xmlInput == null) {
      inputFile = ofs.GetAbsolutePathName(args.item(idx));
      xmlInput = createNewXMLObj();
      xmlInput.load(inputFile);
   }

if (xmlStyle == null || xmlInput == null || error) {
   WScript.Echo('Usage:\n\t"xsltproc" xsl-stylesheet input-file\n\t\t["-o" output-file] *["--param" name value]');
}
else {
   var xslt = new ActiveXObject("MSXML2.XSLTemplate.3.0");
   xslt.stylesheet = xmlStyle;
   var xslProc = xslt.createProcessor();
   xslProc.input = xmlInput;

   for (var keyVar in xslParams)
      xslProc.addParameter(keyVar, xslParams[keyVar]);

   xslProc.transform();

   if (outputFile == null)
      WScript.Echo(xslProc.output);
   else {
      var xmlOutput = createNewXMLObj();
      xmlOutput.loadXML(xslProc.output);
      xmlOutput.save(outputFile);
   }
}

js xml jscript windows xslt technical xsltproc wscript xsl javascript

validate - Dave's Blog

Let's Encrypt NearlyFreeSpeech.net Update

Tweet from David_Risney

URI functions in Windows Store Applications

Summary

Scenarios

Parse

WsDecodeUrl (C++)

Build (C#)

WsEncodeUrl (C++)

Normalize

Equality

Relative resolution

Encode data for including in URI property

WsEncodeUrl (C++)

Decode data extracted from URI property

WsDecodeUrl (C++)

Parse Query

Build Query

FireFox doesn't have innerText

Sam Ruby: First Polyglot Validator Check Deployed

Windows Internet Explorer Testing Center

XSL Transforms in JavaScript

Feed Validator for Atom and RSS

CSS Validation Service

The W3C Markup Validation Service