The End of XBM as we know it
Microsoft giveth, and Microsoft taketh awayeth. Damn Microsofth. They’ve killed the super-cool, barely known, rarely used x-bitmap (XBM) image. Kind of.
Recently Wolf5k got front-paged on Digg, and in the comments I noticed some people where having troubles with it noting, “I just get a broken image” or some such. This sounded odd, so I decided to investigate.
Wolf5k, the 5k javascript implementation of Wolfenstein 3d, was what lead me to first discover the XBM image and its javascriptable magic.
I had a look at my post and Wolf5k and they seemed fine. Then I checked them out in IE6. No XBM. This couldn’t be right… surely Microsoft didn’t get rid of XBM support?! Nope - there is an XBM file in my post and that was showing fine. But the scripted XBMs were not to be seen.
After some exhaustive searches ’round the internet I found that scripted XBM’s have been made a no-no since window’s service pack 2. This can be worked-around by importing (or modifying if its already there as “1″) the following item into registry.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Security]
“BlockXBM”=dword:00000000
BlockXBM!!!! Damn them!!!! Why would they block scripted XBM’s, and why is the registry key in the security section of IE? Then I remembered what I had written in my old post:
XBM images probably aren’t going to take over the web anytime soon, but keep an eye on them. They are so obscure that I’m sure a windows buffer overflow vulnerability will spring up from them shortly.
Could it be that my post was read, and my jesting triggered a series of events that lead to the expulsion of the scripted XBM from the ‘net? After all, it was some of my off-hand derogatory comments that got the <random-blink> tag removed from HTML.
Oh no! It’s worse than I realised! The BlockXBM registry setting actually blocks ALL xbms - even non-scripted ones! That means IE users can’t even see my hand-calculated R.I.P image. That took me AGES converting pixels to decimal to hex using calc.exe. Well, I suppose it’s just one more reason to get firefox.
-Mr. SpeakerHmmm, micro sloth does it again, get firefox.
-markgod help us what they will cut when the over priced and resource greedy “vista” comes into the mainstream????
well you gotta have hardware accelleration to plany minesweeper…….
-skipLooks like scripted XBMs are now being disabled in the newer versions of Firefox (1.5.0.11). Aaaarrrggghhh.
-AlIt fails when you have object.src = javascript:xbmdata;
-AlThe error I get is that xbmdata is not defined. still works.