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Introducing a new HTML element – welcome

shkspr.mobi

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Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#13
The person writing this has to repeat frequently that they're OK with the element; it's quite funny how hard they try not to upset people.

But their view of the situation is completely correct; just because this one feature might be useful (heck, when Microsoft dumped XMLHttpRequest on us that was incredible too), doesn't change the fact that we're now living in a web where Google does whatever it wants, adds whatever it wants to Chrome, and the web is at its mercy. If they wanted to add it'd get added and supported, and other browsers would have to follow lest they become incompatible.

There's not really much of a difference between the web today and the "Best viewed in IE" web, and that's sad. There's a difference in developer goodwill, and of course things aren't as buggy as they were back then so it overall doesn't feel like you're "stuck" with Chrome like it did with IE, but... you are. You're just OK with it.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#15
post #10

For another and possibly more egregious example, look at Chrome's handling [0]. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ar1qj1/x/egl52...

Unfortunately, it's not just Chrome doing stupid stuff with auto-complete.

The latest Safari (bundled with Mojave) tries to auto-complete email addresses using your address book. That's not at all a bad idea, except that like most things Apple of late, the implementation sucks. When you give the input box focus, it opens up some sort of weird dialog prompt, which pulls you out of full-screen mode if you had it enabled. Really messed up our 3D web viewer.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#16
post #13

The person writing this has to repeat frequently that they're OK with the element; it's quite funny how hard they try not to upset people. But their view of the situation is completely correct; just because this one feature might be useful (heck, when Microsoft dumped XMLHttpRequest on us that was incredible too), doesn't change the fact that we're now living in a web where Google does whatever it wants, adds whateve…

I have been repeating the Chrome is the new IE meme for the last few years. I even had a boss that only cared about our code working on Chrome and would lose it when I was demoing / developing from FireFox. I only ever demoed in Chrome just to feed that illusion that I was adhering to Chrome but I honestly dont see anything special or better and I still made sure it behaved and worked the same in both. I know people in my office use other browsers (these were internal tools).

It saddens me that people worship Chrome and yet Firefox has a lot more potential in some areas. Hell it was Mozilla and not Google that gave us WebAssembly through asm.js and other awesome efforts. Microsoft gave us AJAX when Mozilla reverse engineered it back when standards were not properly standardized which is why AJAX is so XML focused in the name despite being able to fetch other things.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#18
post #8

Note, this is a sarcastic opening to a serious proposal — that Google not dump elements into the WHATWG HTML spec without user discussion and use cases: The way Google has gone about this seems to be… 1. Ooh! I have a cool idea! 2. Other people in Google agree with me! 3. Other Google projects could benefit from this? 4. Let's stick it in Chrome! 5. Oh, guess we should tell the community what we're doing. He thinks m…

I don't see how toast is different from the countless proposals for new declarative UI HTML elements that have been submitted over the years, and ignored or withdrawn (such as menu/menuitem), other than it coming from Google (and maybe Google not wanting to expose that functionality via a JavaScript API?) The reasoning against new UI elements has always been the same - they're inessential when JavaScript is needed anyway. I think this incident should make it very clear to everyone that HTML as seen by "browser vendors" (Google) is a very different thing from HTML the markup language as used all over the world for personal, business, medical, legal, and cultural documents, and which demands community representation and participation.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#19
post #13

The person writing this has to repeat frequently that they're OK with the element; it's quite funny how hard they try not to upset people. But their view of the situation is completely correct; just because this one feature might be useful (heck, when Microsoft dumped XMLHttpRequest on us that was incredible too), doesn't change the fact that we're now living in a web where Google does whatever it wants, adds whateve…

There's not really much of a difference between the web today and the "Best viewed in IE" web, and that's sad

At least back then sites were not as reliant on JS, so I think that's one of the ways it was better; sure, sites often looked different in non-IE vs. IE, but you could still consume the mostly-static content (and what wasn't static was almost always ads...) Now there are far too many "appifications" of sites that shouldn't be anything but static pages, JS is required to render their content, and that JS is often very browser-specific.

Re: Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

#20
post #13

The person writing this has to repeat frequently that they're OK with the element; it's quite funny how hard they try not to upset people. But their view of the situation is completely correct; just because this one feature might be useful (heck, when Microsoft dumped XMLHttpRequest on us that was incredible too), doesn't change the fact that we're now living in a web where Google does whatever it wants, adds whateve…

> The person writing this has to repeat frequently that they're OK with the element; it's quite funny how hard they try not to upset people.

I don't know - I kind of figured that was part of the joke - I thought it was pretty clever.

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