Greasemonkey

Hacks 29–39: Introduction The Web contains a fantastic array of services, applications, and interactive experiences. You can shop online, do research, check your email, and interact with other people on weblogs, message boards, and discussion forum...

If you hover your cursor over a link, Firefox will show you the target URL in the status bar. But there is no similar functionality for forms. Clicking the Submit button could send you anywhere, and you won't know where until you're already there. Th...

One of the features of HTML forms is the ability to include hidden form fields. If you view source on a page, you can see them, tucked away next to the visible form fields. Their presence can be completely innocuous, perhaps storing your previous inp...

This hack improves the usability of forms by highlighting password fields with a special background. This makes it faster to fill out forms, because you don't need to worry about accidentally typing your password in the wrong box in clear text. The...

I'm constantly filling out forms with the same data on different sites. Firefox tries to help by remembering past values and autocompleting form fields that it recognizes, but this doesn't always work. What's worse, some sites will use a special HTML...

It's becoming more and more common for complex tasks to be performed on the Web. Of course, there is web-based email, and weblogging and wikis are also popular. Message boards are a great way to form a community, and there are many more online applic...

Many sites now incorporate contributions from users, in the form of feedback, comments, or even direct editing. But the textarea experience can be pretty frustrating, in part, because the fields are often too small. Short of breaking out of the box e...

Textile is a minimalist markup language invented by Dean Allen for his weblog publishing system, Textpattern. Dean originally wrote a Textile-to-XHTML library in PHP. I quickly ported it to Python, and Jeff Minard took my Python version and ported it...

Web-based email is one of the great success stories when it comes to pure web-based applications. But most web mail sites are still more difficult to use than their desktop counterparts. One of the niceties that desktop programs offer is the ability ...

Everyone has too many passwords to remember. Every site—from Expedia to Amazon.com to Gmail to individual blogs and mailing lists—has its own system. Some services—such as Microsoft's Passport, Google's Blogger, and SixApart's TypeKey—have tried to s...

Firefox has an option to remember usernames and passwords in login forms. But even when it remembers your login and autofills the form, you're still left with one last click to submit the form and log into the site. This is definitely an improvement ...

HCalendar is an emerging microformat for displaying event information in XHTML. An HCalendar event can be displayed as is in any web page; the raw data itself is already valid XHTML (and HTML). But the data is structured enough that it can be process...