What's "sheeding"?
Apparently a typo:
https://github.com/jbtronics/CrookedStyleSheets/commit/c5d59...
Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS
151–160 of 180 posts
Re: Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a developer: If we actually pushed browsers to fix things, you wouldn't need to worry about that. Why should the job fall to you to work around their shitty implimentation of the spec?
Because when management asks you why their site that they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for doesn't work on , your answer can't be "the browser's implementation of the spec is shitty, blame them." Your answer is going to be, "Yeah, sure, let me fix that."
Management is not some all-powerful, all-knowing spectre impervious to persuasion. Don't give up so easily.
Re: Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a developer: If we actually pushed browsers to fix things, you wouldn't need to worry about that. Why should the job fall to you to work around their shitty implimentation of the spec?
Because when management asks you why their site that they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for doesn't work on , your answer can't be "the browser's implementation of the spec is shitty, blame them." Your answer is going to be, "Yeah, sure, let me fix that."
Well, your answer should be: I'll reimpliment it using known, simple, stable technologies. But for some reason our industry hates those things.
Re: Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using lynx, the only thing that makes reading Hacker News somewhat inconvenient is the lack of indentation to show the nesting hierarchy, but otherwise it works quite well. Some other sites are so messed up that it's actually more comfortable to read them in a text-only browser that completely ignores CSS and replaces images by their alt-tags. Of course I frequently do want to look at images, so my main browser remai…
You can see the indentation if you use w3m. HN uses tables to structure the comment hierarchy, and the w3m browser does a pretty great job rendering tables.
w3m sets the column width for the HN nested table spacer all to one value, so you visually only get two levels on nesting. Here is a screenshot of this thread as rendered by w3m:
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/rZ1yOj55fvQqtWWbOnoSTpvCgx...
w3m table rendering is based on a heuristic algorithm and fails in some cases. See the "Table rendering algorithm in w3m" section in:
Re: Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a developer: If we actually pushed browsers to fix things, you wouldn't need to worry about that. Why should the job fall to you to work around their shitty implimentation of the spec?
"Yeah sure thing boss. I'll get on the phone to Microsoft and ask them to fix that issue in IE8 that you insist needs to be supported."
So you think a better way is spending your evening trying to fix your square pegs so that they fit in round holes?
Why would you willingly do that to yourself? If we pushed browser developers to actually do their job, they wouldnt be pushing their weight around like they do now.
Re: Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS
#156I don't see what's problematic about this. The tracking is not really done in CSS, so much as on the server. You could accomplish the same thing with 1x1 images, or loading any remote resource. Effectively the only difference is you're loading the URL conditionally via CSS, as opposed to within a ` ` or ` ` tag. Furthermore, this can be blocked in the same way as any tracking URL. I concede this is a novel way of fin…
Think about people using extensions like NoScript to block JS because it offers this functionality. This is fairly relevant to these people, as they clearly also need a “NoCSS” extension.
Re: Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a developer: If we actually pushed browsers to fix things, you wouldn't need to worry about that. Why should the job fall to you to work around their shitty implimentation of the spec?
Because 100% of implementations are differently shitty. There's no amount of "pushing browsers to fix things" that is going to catch 100% of novel interactions resulting from different combinations of the declarative HTML and CSS languages out in the wild (especially when JavaScript then comes along and moves all those declarations around anyway).
Sure, and the browsers that stray further off will get used less and die off.
And if you are using the latest and "greatest" JS features, you have to expect the failures that happen. If you enjoy sitting on the bleeding edge, don't complain about getting cut.
If you implement features using known, simple and stable tech, things will generally work great without needing to worry about special cases.
Re: Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a developer: If we actually pushed browsers to fix things, you wouldn't need to worry about that. Why should the job fall to you to work around their shitty implimentation of the spec?
Yeah why ask to be empowered to fix your own problems when you could just beg someone else to fix them?
How is a browser not rendering correctly not their problem?
Re: Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always thought this. Just code to the standard, and if the browser doesn't render it correctly, then tell the user to fuck off and fix their browser. I don't know why we ever thought sending all this data to the server was a good idea
if 99% of websites you visit work great, and 1 website you visit tells you to fuck off and fix your browser, are you going to do that or are you going to just not use that site? Remember: incentives. The goal of a web developer is to make sites people use.
Yeah, I would just leave that site. But if you implement that feature using known simple and stable, tech, you wont really have that problem.
> Remember: incentives. The goal of a web developer is to make sites people use.
The goal should be to empower users. Anyone can make a site that people "use"
Re: Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, which is why GA is not allowed to load in my browsers. This is a different avenue for disclosure of a similar bundle of info.
Just curious: Are you okay if it's something self-hosted (like Piwik) doing the same kind of tracking? In other words: Do you not want a third party (like Google) to have that data or the second party (web administrators)?
IMHO I think they are different. So much of what makes the web and surveillance creepy is the ability to correlate across data sources. CCTV isn't creepy for one store owner to have - it's bad when the government has it everywhere.
It's not bad for people to analyze how users interact with their site. It's bad when one entity (or a handful) can track you across the Internet.
So in other words, I don't mind Piwik and have considered sending in a patch to uBlock and others with a switch to disabled "locally hosted analytics" or something similar. Like the drive to push "ethical advertising", I think it's reasonable to permit some benign tracking as a way to coerce more sites into decentralizing user analytics.