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Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

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Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#2

Post by kevingadd »

I don't know if I buy it. The jump list isn't really part of the page itself, it's metadata attached to the 'website' in question, so I sort of understand them putting it in ... at the very least, I don't think it makes sense as an inline element in the middle of the page content. It sucks having all those meta tags there, though, since that's a huge blob of html that has to go in the header of every page when it really should live in a metadata file somewhere on your site... sort of like a stylesheet.

Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#3

Post by confuzatron »

A jump list isn't an HTML document - I'm not sure describing it with html tags makes sense, since it'd be too easy to write invalid jumplist markup that's valid HTML. I could envisage somehow replacing RSS with HTML (use the right tags, in the right order, don't use the wrong tags), but it wouldn't make much sense.

Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#5

Post by bl4k »

I can tell you right away what their response will be, and it is that meta extensions are an accepted way of extending HTML5 with browser-specific features, see:

http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/MetaExtensions

"You may add your own values to this list, which makes them legal HTML5 metadata names. We ask that you try to avoid redundancy; if someone has already defined a name that does roughly what you want, please reuse it."

They will also argue that menu is intended to create toolbars and menus within a webpage, not within the browser itself - and that by using meta extensions, the IE team have implemented their browser-specific extensions in a standards-based way supported by the WHATWG. They will say that it also doesn't pollute the markup with an extension that only applies to a single browser on a single platform (which is why WHATWG developed the meta extensions). In short, pages that implement this are HTML5 compliant.

Now my own opinion. The browser makers need differentiation between their products. Browser market share is as important, if not more important, than OS market share.

If Microsoft want to enable websites to deeply integrate with a Windows desktop by using meta extensions, then that seems like the right place to do it. A lot of us would prefer that every browser maker simply implements the standards, but a lot of innovation in web technologies (img tag, applets, xmlhttprequest) started life as browser-specific extensions. Frowning upon, or not allowing any differentiation would remove a lot of motivation for pouring resources into browser development.

As much as we might not like it, we have to deal with it - at least they put this extension in the right place with meta instead of not implementing menu properly or doing their own implementation of menu (besides, I can't think how this desktop pinning would work on for eg. OS X and Chrome - it seems something very 'active desktop' windows specific).

Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#6

Post by mrkurt »

Wow, weird to see markup of mine show up in a blog somewhere.

Meta tags are the most standards compliant way to do those jump menus. I don't buy the idea of hijacking a menu tag to alter browser chrome. From an implementation perspective, I'd much rather they let me link to a manifest file of some kind than add multiple meta tags in places, but it's not a horrible choice.

As an aside, I can tell you that if they'd implemented it as a menu tag, we wouldn't have put it on Ars for the purposes of that article.

Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#9

Post by alextgordon »

I think the best way to do it would be an XML file referenced from a meta tag. This is a property of websites, not web pages, so it makes sense to put all the information in one place.

    
    
    
    
    
    
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Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#10

Post by _e_ »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #4

Just FYI, you've got a typo in your markup that's preventing your page from validating: should be

Actually it's not me the author. I run in the link at reddit (the conversation there wasn't that interesting about the topic) so i thought to submit it here.

Take care, _e_

Ps: I sent an email to the author of the blog post inviting him to join the conversation here. If interested.

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