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Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

camendesign.com

31–40 of 58 posts

Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#31
"This is the exact same kind of terrible, short-sighted, browser-specific garglemesh that plagued the web with favicon.ico a Microsoft only image format that forced a specific file name and location (and generates billions of 404s across the web every day)."

Hmm. With the iPod, there's the apple-touch-icon.png

Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#32

I think the best way to do it would be an XML file referenced from a meta tag. This is a property of websites, not web pages, so it makes sense to put all the information in one place. Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/ Ars Technica: Serving the technologist for 1.2 decades News http://arstechnica.com/ http://arstechnica.com/favicon.ico Features http://arstechnica.com/features/ http://static.arstechnica.net/ie-jump…

Yeah, a reference to an external file would be a better way to do it. And HTML5 already has the mechanism for this sort of thing: the element[1] and the "rel extensions" registry. [1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/... [2] http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/RelExtensions

Well, to be fair, HTML5 also already has the extension mechanism. I know you're not making the argument that one is more "standardsy" than the other; you're just pointing out that both approaches are equally "standard".

Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#33

I think the best way to do it would be an XML file referenced from a meta tag. This is a property of websites, not web pages, so it makes sense to put all the information in one place. Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/ Ars Technica: Serving the technologist for 1.2 decades News http://arstechnica.com/ http://arstechnica.com/favicon.ico Features http://arstechnica.com/features/ http://static.arstechnica.net/ie-jump…

This also has the advantage of not bloating every HTML page with the jump list data. Using an external resource that is downloaded once at the time of pinning is clearly a technically superior mechanism and I'm surprised that it's not implemented like that already.

Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#34
If you read what you saw and it made absolutely no sense, there is actually more below the image. The footer makes it look like the article has ended. It's like a frame but with no apparent scrollbar. Terrible non-intuitive webdesign (sure looks fancy though).

Here is how it looks like for me: http://s1.image.gd/o/d6/d63da036dc4e2e93670dac425ca017d9b227...

Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#35
I see three different 'issues':

- should we allow companies to bend the standard in order to innovate? - is this implementation a good way to implement this innovation? - is this an innovation that we would like to see on other OSes?

I think the answers to these questions should be yes, no, and maybe. The 'yes' is because that is the norm, and it hasn't turned out bad. The 'no' is for two reasons:

- as others indicated, putting this stuff in an external file makes more sense. - terminology could be made a bit more platform independent.

The 'maybe' is because I think this innovation will turn out to be useful. Other OSes or browsers could implement the way to activate in a completely different way. On the other hand, I do not quite see how this is different from a bookmark that the browser UI knows to display in a small pop-up window. A single meta-tag that indicates 'show this URL in a small borderless window close to what you think is the point it was opened from', plus some Javascript call 'ask the user to put the following URL in his start menu' could do most, if not all what this tries to accomplish. Splitting this into parts has the advantage that it promotes reuse.

Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#36
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, doesn't that just add an extra round trip and yet another mandatory HTTP request? No thanks, I think we've enough of those.

> Uh, doesn't that just add an extra round trip and yet another mandatory HTTP request? No. The request only happens if you decide to "pin" the site, or otherwise give it a first-class status on your machine (one could imagine the same by pining it to the OSX dock or making a site into a "standalone app", I think there was a browser doing that a while ago)

Even worse. That gives first-class status to the "HTML version" which contains links to all of the other "versions" of a webapp.

Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#38
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Uh, doesn't that just add an extra round trip and yet another mandatory HTTP request? No. The request only happens if you decide to "pin" the site, or otherwise give it a first-class status on your machine (one could imagine the same by pining it to the OSX dock or making a site into a "standalone app", I think there was a browser doing that a while ago)

Even worse. That gives first-class status to the "HTML version" which contains links to all of the other "versions" of a webapp.

> That gives first-class status to the "HTML version"

Erm... you make absolutely no sense here?

Of course the "HTML version" (aka hello we're talking about web pages here) is the main resource, what else would be, unicorn and ponies?

Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#39
post #6

Wow, weird to see markup of mine show up in a blog somewhere. Meta tags are the most standards compliant way to do those jump menus. I don't buy the idea of hijacking a menu tag to alter browser chrome. From an implementation perspective, I'd much rather they let me link to a manifest file of some kind than add multiple meta tags in places, but it's not a horrible choice. As an aside, I can tell you that if they'd im…

> I don't buy the idea of hijacking a menu tag to alter browser chrome. The tag does it with no big issue. Though an external ed file (à la RSS/ATOM) would be much better. Meta tags are not really structured and forces everybody to download a bunch of browser-specific crap they don't carte for. > As an aside, I can tell you that if they'd implemented it as a menu tag, we wouldn't have put it on Ars for the purposes o…

Because as people have already said, doing a CSS hack so that your hack doesn't display in the page itself is worse than doing the standards-compliant method of implementing the browser-specific feature via the meta tag.

Here[1] you can see that the standard places no restrictions on what can be entered in the name option and the browser is not required to implement handlers for all names. Given that this is not display HTML, I think the tag is the perfect place for this.

[1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#attr-meta...

Re: Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness

#40
post #27
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish people stopped complaining on HN that linked websites don't work on their iPads, and instead sent bug reports to Apple or authors of the websites.

It's not a bug, it's intentional (and thus obnoxious):

OK, but why not ask the author to fix this?
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