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Introducing a new HTML element – welcome

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

#111

Post by geezerjay »

zylent wrote: post #95
geezerjay wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "toast" means a few words of salutation. That's the purpose of the Toast UI element. A user requests an action, the action returns a successful response, the user receives a message consisting of a few words announcing the success. Just because you are oblivious to the concept it doesn't mean it's bad. It just means you need to learn something before blindly asserting that stuff you don't know and are not familiar…

The point is, "because android does it" is terrible reasoning for naming the thing. It's exactly the point the author here was trying to make. Google does not control the web or define HTML standards in a vacuum, nor is it the focal point of the internet.

> The point is, "because android does it" is terrible reasoning for naming the thing.

That was not the point at all. The point is that the concept of a toast exists and is already widely established. Android is one of those platforms. That's it. I fail to see the point of bitching about Android as if that would undo the dissemination of this particular UI pattern. I mean, Microsoft adopted the concept. Do you expect to undo that by bitching about Windows 10?

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/tiles_and_toasts/2015/07/08...

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

#112

Post by scarface74 »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #103
scarface74 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because “Asia” includes a lot of poorer countries. People go where the money is. http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/japan And that still doesn’t negate my other point, if you exclude iOS, you miss the most affluent users. Who do you think is the most profitable market segment? People buying $50 Android phones or people buying $700 iPhones? Apple doesn’t have to “stop” Google. If Apple doesn’t support…

> And that still doesn’t negate my other point, if you exclude iOS, you miss the most affluent users. Who do you think is the most profitable market segment? People buying $50 Android phones or people buying $700 iPhones? If your service is free and you monetize by selling users' data, they're all the same. You don't have to sell things to your users to make money. Just look at Google! > Again, if I’m writing a websi…

If your service is free and you monetize by selling users' data, they're all the same. You don't have to sell things to your users to make money. Just look at Google!

Because users in the rest of the world who are not as affluent aren’t as attractive to advertisers. You are already seeing it with Google. Google just announced a year over year decline in net income as ad sales increased a lot slower than acquisition costs.

Google doesn’t “sell users data” it sells access to users to advertisers based on their data. Advertisers aren’t willing to pay as much for users data for much less affluent users

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/classic-mistakes-understandin...

Again, the world is not the US. If I'm making a website for Europe or China [1] or South Korea [2] or Vietnam [3], why do I care about the US or Japan market share?

If you combine South Korea and Vietnam you probably have the GDP of a midsize state in the US. In China, if you want to reach the growing middle and upper class - you still have to support iOS.

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

#113

Post by wrycoder »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #56
mbreese wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in the middle of trying this exercise now. Some of the differences are just getting used to new design. For me the most jarring thing is how Firefox’s omnibar works. It isn’t good at showing me the sites I’m looking for after typing just a few characters. Instead, it shows absolutely every page I’ve recently visited at one of those sites. Another design thing is the amount of information on the default new page h…

> For me the most jarring thing is how Firefox’s omnibar works. It isn’t good at showing me the sites I’m looking for after typing just a few characters. Instead, it shows absolutely every page I’ve recently visited at one of those sites. Interesting! I think this may be a case where, over time, as you use a search mechanism, you get used to the kinds of searches that work well with that mechanism. I've had similarly…

I have several sites that I visit daily. All of them can be accessed by typing in the first character, or, at most, two characters - the url then appears in the navbar, just hit .

The strange thing is, every nine months or so, FF will forget one of these urls. It doesn't do it for all of them at once, just one, and it's not related to upgrades. All I have to do is enter the full url and hit enter, and things are back to normal again for that particular url for many months.

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

#116

Post by jerf »

So, uh... fun web history time... this actually kinda existed.

When Internet Explorer 4 or 5 was released, Microsoft was in full-on Embrace and Extend mode, on their way to Extinguish. One of the ways they tried to appeal to businesses (and one of the ways IE4/5-ish ended up being installed well past its best-by date in certain places) was a technology they called ActiveX, basically a brushed up and simplified COM. (The "X" here was from DirectX, which they were trying to market all together; IIRC technically the Agent had nothing to do with DirectX.)

And one of the ActiveX objects they released for this functionality was, basically, Clippy. It was called the Microsoft Agent [1]. It included a number of characters, but you could bring up the real, actual-factual Clippy in Internet Explorer. You could also use text-to-speech to actually speak to the user. It had an API that allowed you to trigger certain pre-cooked animations, move it around the page, etc.

In an advanced mode, you could also specify your own graphics files. It also allowed you to specify graphics for something like 5 different mouth shapes, so you could reasonably lip-sync your new wizard object. I did this to my University's logo back in the day.

I say it "kinda" existed because, technically, this wasn't its own tag. It was an instance of the OBJECT tag [2]. But there was a time where at least in Internet Explorer there literally was HTML you could write that would put the literal Clippy on your web page.

A gallery of the available characters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb9yBfDLjsI

I didn't find any videos of the Clippy character used in a web page, but it shipped in the default control, I'm fairly sure.

I never encountered the Microsoft Agent in the wild.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoCiSRQGJX4

[2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/lwef/access... - "[Microsoft Agent is deprecated as of Windows 7, and may be unavailable in subsequent versions of Windows.]" "To keep Agent running between pages (and thereby keep a character visible), create another client that remains loaded between page changes. For example, you can create an HTML frameset and declare an tag for Agent in the parent frame." Remember frames?

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

#117

Post by jboles »

OnlyOneCannolo wrote: post #34
giancarlostoro wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I try switching from Chrome to Firefox at least once a year, but the UI design keeps me firmly entrenched as a Chrome user.

I used to use Firefox but it blew chunks at doing intranet authentication. Auth prompts for days. I had to use an extension that loaded an IE browser pane so that I wouldn’t spend half my work day typing my password. I hope they have improved.

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

#119

Post by geezerjay »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #101
geezerjay wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "toast" means a few words of salutation. That's the purpose of the Toast UI element. A user requests an action, the action returns a successful response, the user receives a message consisting of a few words announcing the success. Just because you are oblivious to the concept it doesn't mean it's bad. It just means you need to learn something before blindly asserting that stuff you don't know and are not familiar…

The connotations of "toast" as salutation are even worse here; hardly anything is similar between giving a toast and a transient message (that's in practice usually about failure, not success) showing up at the bottom of the screen. Out of all the reasons why they could've named it "Toast", the most reasonable one to me would be "because it's another kind of a pop-up notification, and the phrase 'pop-up notification'…

> The connotations of "toast" as salutation are even worse here;

I don't understand your problem with the concept. It's pretty clear what it means and how it operates, and the UI concept has been extensively disseminated and adopted, not only in web-base UI and UX but also in GUI toolkits for mobile (android) and desktop (Windows 10).

Exactly where are you having problems understanding the concept?

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

#120

Post by hajile »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #40
tannhaeuser wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference though: when Firefox was launched, it was still possible to develop a browser from scratch (like Opera was doing back then), and hence lively competition. Nowadays, with WHATWG HTML's feature creep (the HTML "living standard" spec alone weighing in at 1250 pages and 13.3 MB as a PDF, plus tens of CSS specs all over the place, and JavaScript a moving target), that's infeasible for even a nation-s…

Firefox has rewritten its entire rendering engine, and its entire CSS engine. Writing a browser is incredibly hard, but not infeasible.

While writing rendering engine isn't easy to do, it's extremely easy compared to the HTML part. Even Mozilla isn't in a hurry to rewrite all that code.
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