I’ve recently been working for a colleague and a client on implementing a website and ecommerce site in Business Catalyst.
Business Catalyst is a web publishing platform originally developed by a couple of Australians in 2004, but was acquired by Adobe Systems in 2009. It promises to be an all-in-one solutions for business websites (there’s your red flag right there) with tight integration of it’s online store, tracking and analytics.
But there’s just one problem with it.
It sucks.
I was trying to find a good function/library which I could use to sanitize HTML using Javascript.
Like many before me, I’ve spent a good number of programming hours/days/weeks in the past trying to write my own regular expressions to do this. But I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy to do that ever again. The techniques for XSS are many and advanced and you’ll be fighting an uphill battle if you think you can “roll your own”.
I wanted to do it both on the client side as well as the serverside (node.js). After some wasted time googling around I posted a question on stack overflow and found out that there are a number of good libraries out there.
Check out Dreamhost.com.
