11–20 of 265 posts
I don’t like how Google now gets to ‘launch new HTML elements’ as they see fit for their own purposes.
At the end of the day, web standards are nothing more than advisory and Google own a clear majority of browser market share. Who is going to stop them?
At first glance, this seems really cool. Then I remember it's Google we're talking about here. Somehow I feel like this is something they can use to benefit their search engine and/or AMP-style efforts. Keep more users within their controlled environments rather than officially navigating to a real website elsewhere. Also seems like potential phishing problems could arise. Can someone explain to me how this portal el…
>Keep more users within their controlled environments rather than officially navigating to a real website elsewhere But that seems to be exactly what it does: look at the image at the top of the article, the address bar clearly changes to the portal-target's location. I think that's what they mean by "can be navigated into".
Having built-in page previews is actually a useful feature but without the other useful feature of
"play video" -> "click video to open page" -> "video continues playing while the rest of the real page renders around it" -> "you are now really on the other page with no connection to the previous page"
it seems like the business motivation for this was to embed more content in Google Search while keeping Google branding in the background.
For example, engineers hope that when a user is
navigating a news site, when they reach the bottom
of a story, related links for other stories are
embedded as portals, which the user can click and
seamlessly transition to a new page.
So this example really doesn't make it clear to me why we need this new element?
> Furthermore, portals can also overwrite the main URL address bar, meaning they are useful as a navigation system
Isn't this already possible with iframes and target="_top" / target="_parent"? You can also use the -Tag inside the iframe.
> The advantage over using Portals over classic links is that the content inside portals can be pre-loaded while the user scrolls through a page, and be ready to expand into a new page without having the user wait for it to load.
What? What about the vast majority of links that appear in-line, in text (think Wikipedia). What about the increased bandwidth usage for pre-loaded pages I don't intend to visit? What about the obvious tracking issues? What about the further increased difficulty for users to even tell which page they are actually on, if the transition to another page is now smooth and not clear-cut?
This article makes it seem like magically removes all the security concerns people had for decades with iframes, which imho is not the case at all.
I don’t like how Google now gets to ‘launch new HTML elements’ as they see fit for their own purposes.
At the end of the day, web standards are nothing more than advisory and Google own a clear majority of browser market share. Who is going to stop them?
We are, 10s of millions of users (if not 100s).
Do they use their internet dominance to invent a bunch of complex html elements so google becomes the only one being able to parse html effectively in the future? I hope not.
What's less natural is that so many other browsers/frameworks chose to be based upon it (like every Electron app in the world, Opera, Silk, Microsoft Edge real soon now™). Apart from Safari or Firefox, there aren't really many alternatives anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the end of the day, web standards are nothing more than advisory and Google own a clear majority of browser market share. Who is going to stop them?
We are, by using and recommending browsers not owned by advertising conglomerates.
I don’t like how Google now gets to ‘launch new HTML elements’ as they see fit for their own purposes.
They're doing this in the open through the W3C WICG process [1]. They're not doing this as they see fit.
> for their own purposes.
Open standards are available for anyone to use and benefit from. That they may have had a use case in mind when defining the spec does not invalidate it; rather, it reinforces it and shows its value.
For example, engineers hope that when a user is navigating a news site, when they reach the bottom of a story, related links for other stories are embedded as portals, which the user can click and seamlessly transition to a new page. Perhaps it's not a very good description, but isn't that just a link? That sounds a lot like a link to me? So this example really doesn't make it clear to me why we need this new element…