Live data from Hacker News

Google launches new “portal” HTML element

zdnet.com

31–40 of 265 posts

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#31

But is it "google launches" or "google proposes"? I think semantic details matter a lot here. The article is written in a way that it makes it look like W3C does not exist.

Agreed. There's one line about a drafted standard, along with a note that no other browser vendor has expressed interest.

I do not want to return to the days of incompatible browsers (to the degree it was) even if they now publish a draft of how it works - the goal is compatibility, not POTENTIAL compatibility.

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#32
post #30

It's kind of funny, how mobile today is a big part of traffic and this will only increase, yet while the mobile experience is already terrible, especially in chrome with no script blocker, google constantly works at making it even worse, with preloading of undesired, external content. Does Silicon Valley not have data caps? I guess they never have bad reception, though. So at least the malicious add that preloaded in…

If you're connected to a VPN, install pi-hole on that network and use it as dns. If not, just get blokada from f-droid. It uses 1-3% energy over the day on my phone, but saves around 15% by filtering ads

Or just switch to Firefox on Android and use uBlock Origin or similar.

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#33

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…

I think it's largely a user experience thing. Because the "portal" has already been loaded and rendered, you don't need to add the delay of loading the new page at the point of navigation.

But if performance boosts from preloading are all you want, you could just add a 'preload' attribute to the usual tag. The stated rationale of supporting spiffy transitions seems a bit more sensible, though, given how many hooks this has into browser UI, I'd be interested in seeing the limits on what, say, a malicious ad network could do with it.

(Besides, if a page has several dozen links, exactly how many of them can you afford to preload before that activity starts bogging things down? The ZDnet article talks about this behavior replacing all links, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me...)

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#34

It's kind of funny, how mobile today is a big part of traffic and this will only increase, yet while the mobile experience is already terrible, especially in chrome with no script blocker, google constantly works at making it even worse, with preloading of undesired, external content. Does Silicon Valley not have data caps? I guess they never have bad reception, though. So at least the malicious add that preloaded in…

This new element will likely not show up as a negative on any site analysis reports... a sneaky way to make your site "appear" faster but still be a resource hog.

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#35
I read this:

"The advantage...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."

My brain translated it to this:

"The advantage...is that advertisements can be pre-loaded while the user scrolls through a page, and be ready to add to Google's revenue without having the user to wait for it to load."

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#36
post #7

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?

If mobile app store revenues can be used as a metric for revenues on the web generally, iOS users are a valuable demographic to target, even if they are the minority. If your website doesn't work in Safari, you're going to lose revenue.

doesn't feel like something that will ever be supported in Safari.

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#37
I had to double-check that it's not an article form 1999 or something, when everyone was building "portals", with a very similar premise of having everything in one place [1].

It took mere ~25 years in the industry to see things making rounds and old ideas coming back as new, unironically. X Terminal and "network computers" → browser, JVM → WASM, CGI → serverless, Modula/Oberon → Go; now → and the whole idea around it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#38

I read this: "The advantage...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." My brain translated it to this: "The advantage...is that advertisements can be pre-loaded while the user scrolls through a page, and be ready to add to Google's revenue without having the user to wait for it to lo…

Advertisements already can be and are preloaded. This just enables navigating to another page without going back to the server.

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#39

I read this: "The advantage...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." My brain translated it to this: "The advantage...is that advertisements can be pre-loaded while the user scrolls through a page, and be ready to add to Google's revenue without having the user to wait for it to lo…

So shall we expect that google will penalize in search results the sites which don't use new "portal" element as they do now with AMP?
Post reply on HN