Gotchas using 'Mark of the Web'?

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Centauri27
Sr. Propeller Head
Posts: 134
Joined: Thu Apr 17, 2008 11:30 am
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

Gotchas using 'Mark of the Web'?

Post by Centauri27 »

I would like to hear from anyone who have discovered 'gotchas' while using the "Mark of the Web" feature. I used it once many releases ago and (to my dismay) discovered that screenshots were missing. I have disabled this feature ever since. But our customers have been complaining about the blocked ActiveX controls in IE and I'm considering re-enabling this again. I notice that the Flare help warns that external links to files such as JPG, GIF, etc., will not work with MoTW enabled. This sounds like the problem I had before. I ran a quick test on a sample project and found that inserted JPG, GIF, PNG, and BMP images do appear normally with MoTW enabled. Am I misunderstanding the limitation? Are there any other issues that others have experienced?

Thanks.
Carl
RamonS
Senior Propellus Maximus
Posts: 4293
Joined: Thu Feb 02, 2006 9:29 am
Location: The Electric City

Re: Gotchas using 'Mark of the Web'?

Post by RamonS »

MoTW is only applicable to IE, real browsers do not need this hack to display help properly. MoTW is also only needed when the help is loaded from a local file system or a network share. If it is provided through a web server (running locally, Intranet, or Internet) MoTW is not needed.
I know it won't go over well with some folks, but my advice is to stop using IE and recommend Chrome or Firefox. As long as people are encouraged to continue using IE and web developers spend endless hours to make perfectly fine code work on IE by adding hacks and tricks and intentionally bad code nothing will change. I know it is a tall order to bump a giant like Microsoft around and everyone rightfully can argue that it ought not to be their task to take on that campaign, but then don't complain that IE always needs an "Extrawurst" as the Germans say. IE in all its version is and always was a craptastic browser. Don't use it and stop optimizing for it.
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