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Introducing a new HTML element – welcome

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

#191

Post by mcguire »

module0000 wrote: post #141
dccoolgai wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really agree with the "Chrome is the new IE" sentiment. They participate in the Web Standards process the same as anyone else. That their voice has different gravity in the process due to the fact that they are often the ones pushing the standards forward isn't something they should be compared to IE for. Devs old enough to recall the halcyon days of IE know it was quite different...

With Chrome, you also get Chromium, and the ability to see inside(and contribute!) to development. This did not exist in the IE-dominated era. Link to chromium dev: https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel

Out of curiosity, how much flows from Chromium to Chrome, compared to vice-versa?

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

#192

Post by WorldMaker »

Insanity wrote: post #46
tech2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly I try Chrome once every which and go right back to Firefox for exactly the same reason. I find the Chrome UI intolerable. Tiny tabs, inflexible GUI, less interesting extensions, etc. I also tend to use _many_ tabs (grouped by topic I'm working on) so maybe I'm a bit of an unusual case.

It is probably a quite subjective thing. I use Firefox as main browser but test things in Chrome. Neither UI really bothers me, but I prefer Firefox for ideological reasons. The dev tools in chrome are better though imo.

I feel like Firefox's Dev Tools are better in so many small ways at the fundamentals it's really sad every time someone says they prefer Chrome Dev Tools. (Plus, Firefox's Dev Tools inherited from Firebug and at least from that sort of continuity perspective arguably are the most mature Dev Tools codebase.)

A lot of the reason so many people seem to like Chrome Dev Tools better seems to be exactly the sort of "Works best in IE6" mentality that so many devs only spend time testing in Chrome and customizing Chrome Dev Tools how they like and making sure Chrome Dev Tools work right that it just becomes inertia that that is what they like better.

Little tweaks to sourcemap generation options, for instance, can be all it takes to get Firefox Dev Tools working just as well as Chrome for code debugging, but so many devs work in Chrome only that the defaults in so many places are accidentally so Chrome-centric.

Similar goes for all the Chrome-only Dev Tools extensions. At this point even the Dev Tools Extension Models are close enough between Chrome and Firefox that it mostly just needs more people using Firefox for development to catch up on extensions.

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

#193

Post by WorldMaker »

jerf wrote: post #116

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. (…

> I never encountered the Microsoft Agent in the wild.

Then you missed out on the silly games I wrote for it, or the way I got around having to speak my own class presentations by having PowerPoint narrate itself. (I wish I had more videos of that stuff that I did in school given that deprecation has bit rotted it all.)

Also, you never got accidentally talked into installing ~malware~ "friendly user assistance and downloader tools" like Bonzi Buddy.

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

#194

Post by untog »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #155
munk-a wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, IE6 was far less terrible than IE4, but still amazingly awful. If was from the era of browsers where you had to essentially code up different copies of a page per-browser if you wanted any sort of graphical anything.

No you didn't. You had to code exactly one copy: for IE6. Nobody cared about anything else. Just like nowadays more and more pages only get coded for chrome and might or might not work on Firefox.

The scale is massively different though. When you make a page today 95% of it works on all browsers. Back in the IE6 days that wasn't even remotely true, which is why things like jQuery came into existence, not to mention the insane CSS hacks required. IE calculated padding differently to every other browser, requiring you to rewrite any code that used it. There's no equivalent to that today.

Today isn't a dreamland, but it is in no way as bad as the IE6 days.

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

#195

Post by jerf »

WorldMaker wrote: post #193
jerf wrote: post #116

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. (…

> I never encountered the Microsoft Agent in the wild. Then you missed out on the silly games I wrote for it, or the way I got around having to speak my own class presentations by having PowerPoint narrate itself. (I wish I had more videos of that stuff that I did in school given that deprecation has bit rotted it all.) Also, you never got accidentally talked into installing ~malware~ "friendly user assistance and do…

"Also, you never got accidentally talked into installing ~malware~ "friendly user assistance and downloader tools" like Bonzi Buddy."

Ah, yes... clarification: I never encountered it in the wild on a webpage that wasn't specifically about the Microsoft Agent. I did have a couple of commercial programs that used it, though nothing huge.

It did require a machine with what at the time was a generous amount of RAM to handle everything that spun up to run that thing. Nowadays, of course, it would be nothing, lost in the noise of the fluctuation of your Slack window, but at the time, megabytes of RAM were still a pretty big deal.

It is true I never installed Bonzi Buddy, but I was aware it used the Microsoft Agent. ISTR someone thinking it must take a ton of programming to make that happen, and I actually showed them my animated school logo and how little code it took to prove the opposite.

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

#196

Post by mattferderer »

chris_wot wrote: post #170
mattferderer wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm old enough to remember there was a simple fix. Badges of honor you might even say! "This website supports Netscape Navigator 4."

That definitely didn't work. Features we wanted to use that were standardized could not be used. Even after the browser got updated, we couldn't use them because lots of people used the old browser. Browser incompatibility was used to lock entire enterprises into using only Internet Explorer. Badges did nothing to help.

It was a joke.

The only thing it seemed to do was let you know what browser the developer/s were using.

If you happened to have multiple browsers it was possibly of some benefit if you could switch to that browser.

Enterprises still lock users to one browser if possible for security & maintenance reasons. I do see multiple browsers allowed for certain individuals to support older software.

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

#197

Post by jerf »

jerf wrote: post #116

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. (…

"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.)"

This reminds me, one of the small enduring legacies of the 90s X-TREME! craze is that Microsoft still does a lot of marketing around the letter X, even today, like the XBox. And that goes back to ActiveX and DirectX being named in an era where that was intended to make Microsoft sound Hip and Cool and With It. I suppose at this point the XBox has transcended this, and is now just a name.

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

#198

Post by mcgwiz »

crazygringo wrote: post #127
jl6 wrote: post #28

Unlike the author, I do not think is a good idea. Elements are supposed to express semantics, but this just suggests behaviour. Not very descriptive behaviour either - since when does actual real-life toast smoothly rise and fall again? Possibly from the ceiling or coming in from the side? Why not just call it ? Or even better, don’t add anything - it’s surely just a that needs styling and animating with existing CSS…

The name is the least concern here. But it's called a toast because that's what many UX people have called it for years, because it pops up and toast pops up. It's a specific kind of notification, not any notification. (There's also "butter bar" and "modal dialog" and so on.) And yes it's behavior, but and and and define plenty of behavior too. I think the big concern here is standards and process... not its name or…

Agree name isn't primary concern, but by your own definition shouldn't it be called ?

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

#199

Post by WorldMaker »

jerf wrote: post #195
WorldMaker wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never encountered the Microsoft Agent in the wild. Then you missed out on the silly games I wrote for it, or the way I got around having to speak my own class presentations by having PowerPoint narrate itself. (I wish I had more videos of that stuff that I did in school given that deprecation has bit rotted it all.) Also, you never got accidentally talked into installing ~malware~ "friendly user assistance and do…

"Also, you never got accidentally talked into installing ~malware~ "friendly user assistance and downloader tools" like Bonzi Buddy." Ah, yes... clarification: I never encountered it in the wild on a webpage that wasn't specifically about the Microsoft Agent. I did have a couple of commercial programs that used it, though nothing huge. It did require a machine with what at the time was a generous amount of RAM to han…

A lot of people saw Agents (and Bob before it) and expected Alexa/Siri/Cortana-level interaction. Agents were very good in relatively simple animation techniques at conveying an outer complexity that belied the simplicity of most of the actual code written for them.

(That's part of why the "games" webpages I made with them, and the PPTs as well, impressed people a lot more than the rather rudimentary "screenplays" I was actually writing them as felt to me. I felt like I got more credit for that work than I probably deserved.)

I think a lot of people kind of assumed that that level of interaction did exist and was happening behind the curtain, hence some of the very loud and vocal disappointment with Agents, especially in the Office Assistant form that they were never smart enough. I think it was an uncanny valley effect between user experience and user expectations.

It's somewhat ironic that one of the reasons stopping us from applying as much animated "personality" to Alexa/Siri/Cortana seems to be that residual dislike of Agents/Office Assistants despite that in some cases at least it seems like we are ever closer to getting past that uncanny valley.

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

#200

Post by DanBC »

WorldMaker wrote: post #199
jerf wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Also, you never got accidentally talked into installing ~malware~ "friendly user assistance and downloader tools" like Bonzi Buddy." Ah, yes... clarification: I never encountered it in the wild on a webpage that wasn't specifically about the Microsoft Agent. I did have a couple of commercial programs that used it, though nothing huge. It did require a machine with what at the time was a generous amount of RAM to han…

A lot of people saw Agents (and Bob before it) and expected Alexa/Siri/Cortana-level interaction. Agents were very good in relatively simple animation techniques at conveying an outer complexity that belied the simplicity of most of the actual code written for them. (That's part of why the "games" webpages I made with them, and the PPTs as well, impressed people a lot more than the rather rudimentary "screenplays" I…

But, also, Clippy was using suboptimal tech, when they could have had a better version: https://machinelearningagents.com/2009/08/31/lumiere-project...
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