Understanding HTML Injection
XSS can be more generally, although less excitingly, described as HTML injection. The more popular name belies the fact that successful attacks need not cross sites or domains and need not consist of JavaScript to be effective.
An XSS attack rewrites the structure of a Web page or executes arbitrary JavaScript within the victim's Web browser. This occurs when a Web site takes some piece of information from the user – an e-mail address, a user ID, a comment to a blog post, a zip code, and so on – and displays the information in a Web page. If the Web site is not careful, then the meaning of the HTML document can be disrupted by a carefully crafted string.
For example, consider the search function of an online store. ...
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