Warning: Punctuation Marks Can Damage Your Web Site
It seems a missing full stop brought down every web site hosted on a domain ending with .se (the top-level domain for Sweden) on Monday evening.
The .SE registry had apparently performed an incorrect software update but actually a script (program written by a human) had failed to add a terminating full stop (.) to the DNS records in the .se zone. Tested? I guess not.
It reminded me of Google's mishap in May when it flagged every site as potentially harmful by simply adding an extra forward slash (/) character to a file.
And, simple punctuation mistakes can invalidate the HTML of your web page, or stop your application's scripts from running. In July Microsoft created a security flaw in Windows by the addition of an extra ampersand (&) character.
Tim Berners-Lee is still wishing he hadn't put two forward slashes in every URL.
The mighty power of a punctuation mark.
Posted on: 16 October 2009 at 15:24 hrs
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