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Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

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Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#41

Post by nl »

alextgordon wrote: post #9

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. Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/ Ars Technica: Serving the technologist for 1.2 decades News http://arstechnica.com/ http://arstechnica.com/favicon.ico Features http://arstechnica.com/features/ http://static.arstechnica.net/ie-jump…

Oh, you mean like Aurora was going to use? That's Netscape Aurora, in 1998 http://xml.coverpages.org/revengeXML.html

The format was RDF, any any day now it's going to take over the web with all this nicely formed, semantic data!!

Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#43

Post by dchest »

mahmud wrote: post #42
dchest wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but why not ask the author to fix this?

Because it's ironic that he's being a stickler for standards when his own site is broken.

There is nothing ironic in the fact that people cannot afford to test their websites on every single device Apple releases. FYI, I just opened that website on my iPhone and it works great. Perhaps, the viewport meta tag was added here with iPhone in mind, before iPad was released.

Edit: indeed, this is a bug: there are different CSS styles for devices with 480px (via @media CSS rules). Desktop browsers pick the latter style and ignore "viewport" meta tag. iPhone picks the former style and takes into account viewport. iPad picks the desktop style and takes into account viewport, which disables zoom (intended for the iPhone style version).

Now that I debugged the problem, can we instead report bugs to website designers instead of commenting here on HN?

Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#44

Post by dchest »

dchest wrote: post #43
mahmud wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's ironic that he's being a stickler for standards when his own site is broken.

There is nothing ironic in the fact that people cannot afford to test their websites on every single device Apple releases. FYI, I just opened that website on my iPhone and it works great. Perhaps, the viewport meta tag was added here with iPhone in mind, before iPad was released. Edit: indeed, this is a bug: there are different CSS styles for devices with 480px (via @media CSS rules). Desktop browsers pick the latte…

Ah, okay, I got the irony with the non-standard Apple's meta tag :) Took me 18 hours.

Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#45

Post by masklinn »

Locke1689 wrote: post #39
masklinn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't buy the idea of hijacking a menu tag to alter browser chrome. The tag does it with no big issue. Though an external ed file (à la RSS/ATOM) would be much better. Meta tags are not really structured and forces everybody to download a bunch of browser-specific crap they don't carte for. > 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 o…

Because as people have already said, doing a CSS hack so that your hack doesn't display in the page itself is worse than doing the standards-compliant method of implementing the browser-specific feature via the meta tag. Here[1] you can see that the standard places no restrictions on what can be entered in the name option and the browser is not required to implement handlers for all names. Given that this is not disp…

> Here[1] you can see that the standard places no restrictions on what can be entered in the name option

Just because the standard places no restriction on it doesn't mean it's a good idea.

> doing a CSS hack

Setting a CSS property is not a hack.

> so that your hack

Using existing, well-defined elements whose purpose perfectly fit the needs of the situation is not a hack.

> is worse than doing the standards-compliant method of implementing the browser-specific feature via the meta tag.

There is nothing non-standard-compliant about using a object for defining a menu.

Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#46

Post by masklinn »

alsomike wrote: post #29
kevingadd wrote: post #2

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 rea…

His solution is to put the menu in the page content, and use a CSS work-around to not display it. What about screen-readers? I don't think he thought this through.

> What about screen-readers? I don't think he thought this through.

yes, what about screen readers? Screen readers get a well-thought-of menu of accelerators to existing features of the website. If the website is well coded, this can even be one of the website's own, displayed menus.

What is there not to like?

Instead, by embedding it in random meta elements, screen readers have to download the useless code (as does every other browser out there) and can not use any of it.

Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#47

Post by masklinn »

confuzatron wrote: post #3

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.

> A jump list isn't an HTML document

A jump list isn't a bunch of metas either. An HTML or a specific, custom XML format can be ways to describe jumplists. These descriptions are then translated into whatever actual format jumlist specs use. No problem.

> I'm not sure describing it with html tags makes sense

A jump list is a menu. So is a element. You could hardly make more sense.

Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#48

Post by alsomike »

masklinn wrote: post #46
alsomike wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His solution is to put the menu in the page content, and use a CSS work-around to not display it. What about screen-readers? I don't think he thought this through.

> What about screen-readers? I don't think he thought this through. yes, what about screen readers? Screen readers get a well-thought-of menu of accelerators to existing features of the website. If the website is well coded, this can even be one of the website's own, displayed menus . What is there not to like? Instead, by embedding it in random meta elements, screen readers have to download the useless code (as does…

And screen readers would implement that by detecting a meta tag named "ms-application-jumplist"? In other words, screen reader developers should support proprietary Microsoft extensions rather than using the standard methods of supporting screen readers?

You're right, it's brilliant.

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