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Please make your products work with URLs

anderspitman.net

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Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#341

Post by bookofjoe »

kirstenbirgit wrote: post #329
bookofjoe wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off topic: reading back through your comments here, I was surprised to learn you're Danish. Your written English is completely native and natural: is this typical of Danish people? Can schools be that effective?

Thanks! I've been reading and writing English since I was about 10 years old, and I really like writing, so that might have something to do with it. I think that are various levels of proficiency, but in general, most Danes have a very good grasp of it, and it's easy to live here if you only speak English.

At various times in my life I've spoken or studied Hebrew, Yiddish, Spanish, Japanese, and Italian. My proficiency is 0 in all of them. Sic transit gloria mundi....

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#342

Post by JohnFen »

jefftk wrote: post #316
JohnFen wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People who choose to turn off JS are excluding themselves. It goes both ways. Yes, turning off JS means that some sites will fail to work. As I said in my comment, I expect this. On the other hand, a well-designed site should fail gracefully, so that turning off JS won't make the site fail to work, but may make certain features unavailable. Sites that don't fail gracefully (with certain exceptions) are poorly engin…

> Sites that don't fail gracefully (with certain exceptions) are poorly engineered sites that are excluding people unnecessarily. Every time someone makes a site they're balancing a bunch of tradeoffs. For example, when I built https://trycontra.com I could have implemented the search server-side, with a query and response, but this would have involved writing active server side code. Instead I implemented the search…

> I don't feel any obligation to engineer the site differently to accommodate their preference and I don't think the OP should either.

Perhaps you misunderstand what I'm saying. I am not saying that you, or anyone else, is obligated to do anything in particular. All I did was to point out a factor that should be considered -- if your site does not work without JS, then you are excluding some people. If you don't care, fair enough.

However, I stand by my assertion that sites that do not fail gracefully are (with certain exceptions) poorly engineered sites.

> Downloading and executing binaries from random websites is far more risky than allowing JS

That does not mean that allowing JS is safe.

> JS is heavily sandboxed, and browsers have some of the world's best security engineers working on maintaining an ecosystem where people can freely run other people's JS.

Yes, I'm well aware of that. And yet, JS is commonly used to do all sorts of nefarious things (such as tracking, for instance) anyway.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#343

Post by JohnFen »

danShumway wrote: post #323
jefftk wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> JavaScript enables all sorts of attacks on one's security and privacy Could you say more about this?

Not the original commentor, but I'll assume this is a sincere, open question. To start with, I'm not on the anti-Javascript hype train. I write Javascript for a living, I think it's the arguably the most important modern language of the last decade. It's made computers more accessible, it has good ideas, it's reasonably well sandboxed. I love Javascript. I do advocate for progressive enhancement for a lot of reasons,…

This is an excellent comment, thank you. You said much of what I failed to, especially this, which was my main point:

> It's not saying that nothing should run Javascript. It is saying that if you want to run Javascript, you should have a reasonably good justification, and if you're displaying pure text you should probably provide fallbacks when possible.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#345

Post by danShumway »

dredmorbius wrote: post #318
jefftk wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sites that don't fail gracefully (with certain exceptions) are poorly engineered sites that are excluding people unnecessarily. Every time someone makes a site they're balancing a bunch of tradeoffs. For example, when I built https://trycontra.com I could have implemented the search server-side, with a query and response, but this would have involved writing active server side code. Instead I implemented the search…

JS search is not generally a critical site function. Rendering the goddamned content is. If you can't at a minimum give me a title, byline, dateline, main body text and/or some level of summary or description of non-textual content (as with graphics, audio, video, or interactive elements), then you're failing. (SPAs or web applications should at least provide context for understanding what the application is/does. I'…

> If sites could provide a permuted index in accessible format

I'm not going to dismiss this out of hand, but this is a harder problem than you realize. We did have search keywords at one point. The problem was that sites started stuffing them with irrelevant values. Google removed that and started doing their own analysis, because keywords made it too easy to game SEO.

There are certainly ways that keywords could be done better today, I'm not going to say we should give up on the entire concept. But asking websites to self-categorize themselves is a very tricky problem that is very prone to abuse.

Remember that the web (currently) monetizes eyeballs, so until that situation changes there is a strong incentive to show up in every search regardless of whether or not you're relevant.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#346

Post by rafaelvasco »

cpeterso wrote: post #141
rafaelvasco wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never experienced those problems with Tizen but sometimes it lags like hell. After it warms up it's pretty fast; Unfortunately there's no Crunchyroll app yet.

I have a Tizen Samsung TV. It is super laggy. Like 3+ seconds to respond to a button press on the remote. I found some anti-virus options (?!) deep in the TV settings. Turning real-time anti-virus scanning off made that TV almost usable again.

Really ? Antivirus ? Jeez. Gonna try to find and disable it as well; Sometimes after you turn the tv off it turns on by itself. Probably another bug;

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#347

Post by jefftk »

dredmorbius wrote: post #318
jefftk wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sites that don't fail gracefully (with certain exceptions) are poorly engineered sites that are excluding people unnecessarily. Every time someone makes a site they're balancing a bunch of tradeoffs. For example, when I built https://trycontra.com I could have implemented the search server-side, with a query and response, but this would have involved writing active server side code. Instead I implemented the search…

JS search is not generally a critical site function. Rendering the goddamned content is. If you can't at a minimum give me a title, byline, dateline, main body text and/or some level of summary or description of non-textual content (as with graphics, audio, video, or interactive elements), then you're failing. (SPAs or web applications should at least provide context for understanding what the application is/does. I'…

> JS search is not generally a critical site function. Rendering the goddamned content is.

My example was a domain specific search engine. The only thing the site does is let you run searches, implemented client-side in JS. Without JS the site completely doesn't work.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#348

Post by jscholes »

Amen to this article. Concise and right on point. My parents have a Roku streaming stick hooked up to their (relatively dumb) TV, but are not tech-savvy. A bunch of times, they've asked if I know how they can watch X, and I do. I have an HTTP URL to an HLS playlist or similar ready to go. But good luck getting it to play it if no fancy app wrapper exists.

In the end, I set them up a Plex server, which I can securely remotely drop things into. But that comes with its own fair share of ridiculous concerns.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#349

Post by dragonsngoblins »

justinclift wrote: post #154
tmountain wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse yet, Smart TVs often brick themselves due to failed software updates. My last Sony TV did an overnight Android update, and I found it in a state where it'd show the Android boot logo and subsequently shut down. Some Google research showed that this has happened to hundreds of people (youtube videos outlining the problem, etc). Sony refused to do anything due to the TV being out of warranty, and no amount of hac…

> Sony refused to do anything due to the TV being out of warranty. Interestingly, apparently in the UK (or maybe EU?) there's a defined period an appliance is required to work for, to be "fit for purpose". Note - not a warranty thing, it's a consumer goods thing. Not living in the UK any more (thanks Brexit), so don't remember off hand the period of time though.

We have similar things in Australia. Hell our consumer protection laws are why people can get refunds on Steam

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#350

Post by shifto »

jchw wrote: post #17

I hate smart TVs with a burning passion. They accomplish literally the bare minimum to keep people happy and sometimes not even that. Samsung’s Tizen OS is the most genuinely frustrating experience I’ve had with a consumer device outside of printing. Advertisements on my home screen that can’t be disabled, dubious privacy, bugs that require me to reboot my TV, and of course security so bad that they recommend install…

> If you want to watch Twitch.TV streams for example you are SoL. There was an unofficial Twitch app, but it was removed from the store.

I still get worked up about this. I was able to watch streams on my TV using this app and someone somewhere just decided I shouldn't be able no more. The TV has lost value with this change, to me at least.

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