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Google launches new “portal” HTML element

zdnet.com

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Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#101

Post by Touche »

ccnafr wrote: post #75
skymt wrote: post #60

Am I reading this wrong, or is Google pushing a fairly complex element with substantial security considerations into HTML exclusively to solve their UX problems with AMP and the pre-load search carousel? Like this seems like it would be a fair amount of work for browsers to implement, and Google is the only party who would benefit.

No, you're right. Portal is effectively iframe without all the security protections.

I don't understand the cynicism people have for this idea. All they did was say "wouldn't it be cool if you could have nice animations in between pages" and built a proof-of-concept. It's not a finished product. They aren't forcing it into a standard. It's a demo of something that would be cool.

So why the heck are people opposed to that?

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#102

Post by JoshMnem »

keiru wrote: post #93
JoshMnem wrote: post #86

It's going to hurt small sites the most, because sources of traffic like Google, Facebook, and other large sites will eventually stop linking to websites, and load them as previews in frames ("portals") instead. "No other browser vendor has expressed interest in supporting the Portals" -- but Google is releasing it in Chrome anyway. It changes the fundamental nature of the WWW as linked documents. Embrace, Extend, Ex…

In what way loading a site on a portal would be different to loading it on the main window? Portals sound like just a technical UX solution, but would still count as site traffic.

It looks like a way to sort-of link to a site, but to make the default action to return back to the linking site instead of going deeper into the other site. You aren't sending people to the target page, but are just loading a preview. As the target website, even if your analytics show a visit, it might not be a full visit.

15 years ago, it was common for website owners to ask you to "make all links open in a frame" so that the original site could keep a frame on top of all the other content. That was probably only stopped by JavaScript snippets to break out of frames. Portals is the same kind of idea -- give power to the sites that link out (like Google) at the expense of the smaller sites that receive links.

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#103

Post by [deleted] »

mysterydip wrote: post #81
skymt wrote: post #60

Am I reading this wrong, or is Google pushing a fairly complex element with substantial security considerations into HTML exclusively to solve their UX problems with AMP and the pre-load search carousel? Like this seems like it would be a fair amount of work for browsers to implement, and Google is the only party who would benefit.

Isn't this why we have the W3C, so standards don't get made unless multiple people benefit? This seems like Microsoft with IE6 all over again.

[deleted]

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#104

Post by JoshMnem »

tangue wrote: post #10

We got rid of iframes, flash and WAP/imode. Thankfully we have now , Flutter and AMP.

Flutter looks like the junk food of programming. It looks like you get a choice between McDonald's (Google / Material Design) or Burger King (Apple).

People are giving up long-term technology freedom for short-term, beginner's convenience.

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#105

Post by vernie »

Touche wrote: post #101
ccnafr wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're right. Portal is effectively iframe without all the security protections.

I don't understand the cynicism people have for this idea. All they did was say "wouldn't it be cool if you could have nice animations in between pages" and built a proof-of-concept. It's not a finished product. They aren't forcing it into a standard. It's a demo of something that would be cool. So why the heck are people opposed to that?

Well you certainly can't raise a stink after it's in the standard.

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#106

Post by tannhaeuser »

neilalexander wrote: post #17
progfix wrote: post #9

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.

I don't think Google can be wholly blamed for that dominance. It's only natural that they would want to invent their own web rendering engine and with it they can pretty much choose what they do. 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 ma…

IMO it's not so much about blaming or other moralistic category a la "Google is evil" than it is about whether we're going to accept and let happen the Googlification and appification of the web. If we do, than we (as in humanity) must look elsewhere now for our communication needs. Think about how involved the web in everyday life is (in education, personal communication, public services, contracts, law, webmail, ecommerce, etc. etc.). If we accept that this medium is going to slip away and out of control for no good reason, then we need to specify something with a more specific scope for preserving digital documents, contracts, transaction manifests etc. that is also fully able to represent existing (static or dynamic) HTML content.

I'm not just talking the talk here: I've spent significant amout of time (years) in implementing SGML and an SGML grammar for HTML5 [1].

[1]: http://sgmljs.net/blog/blog1701.html

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#107

Post by skybrian »

skymt wrote: post #60

Am I reading this wrong, or is Google pushing a fairly complex element with substantial security considerations into HTML exclusively to solve their UX problems with AMP and the pre-load search carousel? Like this seems like it would be a fair amount of work for browsers to implement, and Google is the only party who would benefit.

If you're reading about this looking for how Google might misuse it, and that's what you see, then it seems like you're reading it as you intended. This isn't surprising. Many things can be read more than one way with only a little imagination.

But there are other ways to read things. Like, how could I use that on my site?

I'm thinking it might be fun to do something like the infinite zoom that Scott McCloud wrote about. Or more practically, it would let everyone put site previews next to links, like Twitter and Facebook do, without needing a big infrastructure.

Or you could think about how arbitrary hackers could misuse it. The security issues seem a bit concerning. But I suppose it could be blocked like iframes?

Re: Google launches new “portal” HTML element

#109

Post by option_greek »

>https://github.com/WICG/portals/blob/master/explainer.md

>This is a proposal for enabling seamless navigations between sites or pages. In particular, this proposal enables a page to show another page as an inset and perform a seamless transition between an inset state and a navigated state.

Like clicking on an ad ?

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