Re: Paper on use of selectors for adaptive hypermedia

Bert Bos wrote:

>A PhD student, Michael Kraus
><michael.kraus@informatik.uni-muenchen.de>, has written a paper on an
>alternative (or: extended) use of CSS and XPath selectors, to allow a
>page to be adapted based on the user's profile.
>

I have carefully read the document and have an important comment to make 
; I am cc:ing Michael Kraus.

I am under the strong impression that implementation of this proposal 
could generate a major security flaw.

With selection based on browsing contexts, I could give a style (color 
for instance) to an element in a web document based on the user's 
browsing history, retrieve the computed value of the color for that 
element, deduce that this web page has been previously visited and send 
the data back to a server on the web. I could also send back to a server 
any information about the browsing device and all the data contained in 
the browsing context.

Minor comment in comparison with this one : the enriched document 
example at the end of section 2 does not allow selectors like the 2nd 
example of section 3 to work. HTML markup is not contained in the 
browsingcontext element...

</Daniel>

Received on Wednesday, 16 January 2002 04:42:06 UTC