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Moonchild, the lead developer of the Pale Moon browser writes:
"Dear Web Developer(s),
While, as a software developer ourselves, we understand very well that new features are exciting to use and integrate into your work, we ask that you please consider not adopting Google WebComponents in your designs. This is especially important if you are a web developer creating frameworks for websites to use.
With Google WebComponents here we mean the use of CustomElements and Shadow DOM, especially when used in combination, and in dynamically created document structures (e.g. using module loading/unloading and/or slotted elements).Why is this important?
For several reasons, but primarily because it completely goes against the traditional structure of the web being an open and accessible place that isn't inherently locked down to opaque structures or a single client. WebComponents used "in full" (i.e. dynamically) inherently creates complex web page structures that cannot be saved, archived or even displayed outside of the designated targeted browsers (primarily Google Chrome).
One could even say that this is setting the web up for becoming fully content-controlled."
https://about.google/: "Our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"
Useful to... whom?
(Score: 3, Funny) by krishnoid on Friday March 20 2020, @08:47PM (24 children)
Shouldn't they be asking them to submit feedback (and provide them an example) to Google with those complaints? That way Google can incorporate the feedback and maybe make WebComponents less like what they're complaining about.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Friday March 20 2020, @08:52PM (5 children)
One corporation should not have control over the World Wide Web.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday March 20 2020, @09:34PM (1 child)
Absolutely. I'm just saying if you don't like that library, having two people at google read your complaints may have more of an effect than having two web developers across the board. And if the web developers complain, you get more of a multiplicative effect too.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Saturday March 21 2020, @02:55AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Saturday March 21 2020, @01:28PM (1 child)
I guess most of today's web devs, and Google coders, aren't old enough to remember back when sites had stupid warnings like "Best if viewed in Internet Explorer" when Microsoft decided to add its own gizmos to HTML. I joked on my site "Best if viewed in the other browser".
I found that I could make my site do Microsoft stuff in Netscape without Microsoft's proprietary nonsense.
Hey, developers: If you don't stick to standards, you're stupid, and Google is stupid for foisting this nonsense on us.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @07:59PM
Ah yes...I remember someone once asked me to rewrite our site (hosted on an old Sun 3/60 at the time) to 'take advantage of the extra features that IE offered'....so I made liberal use of the <marquee> tag...every word scrolling in different directions...
He never specified that it had to be readable in IE..
(Score: 2) by dry on Saturday March 21 2020, @03:48PM
You're right, that is why it'll be 3 or 4 corporations cooperating to have control.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2020, @09:19PM (17 children)
that's incredibly naive. google doesn't give a flying rats ass what people think. it has it's own priorities: it's trying to take over the world.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday March 20 2020, @09:41PM (16 children)
I remember back when Microsoft was a good company with fun products, prior to the IBM PC. Microsoft FORTRAN. Microsoft Adventure (eg, colossal cave) Other fun products. Of course, Microsoft BASIC in early personal computers (pre IBM PC).
Then I remember back when Microsoft was evil and Apple was the good guy.
Then I remember back when Microsoft was evil and Google was the good guy.
Now Apple and Google are evil and everyone seems to have forgotten about how Evil Microsoft was.
Oracle was always evil.
When the Sun went dark, Oracle bought Java.
IBM was evil (mainframes, monopoly). Then good (IBM PC). Then evil (intolerance of clones). Then more evil (PS/2). Then irrelevant. Then good again (support of Linux). Now??
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2020, @10:11PM (1 child)
Now Google's evil. What's so hard about this?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 23 2020, @04:03PM
I think I said Google was evil. And didn't change my mind.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2020, @10:23PM (2 children)
Are Apple evil these days? I consider them indifferent.
They tend to stick to their walled gardens, and don't go fucking up other peoples' shit.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by toddestan on Saturday March 21 2020, @04:41AM
Apple is evil. Look at how they fight against the right to repair, how they squeeze indie artists, how they conspire to fix e-book prices, how they treat the Chinese workers that make their products despite the obscene amount they charge for them, and the list goes on. Don't get distracted by the shiny.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 23 2020, @04:04PM
As someone who once was a loyal card carrying Mac fanboy back in the 80's and 90's I can assure you that in the last decade Apple is most definitely evil, and more so every day.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2020, @11:58PM
They're all evil. They differ over time in their power to inflict their evil on everyone else.
Right now, Google's evil waxes while Microsoft's evil wanes. In a few years, it might be the other way around. Again.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Saturday March 21 2020, @12:03AM (2 children)
Any sufficiently large corporation will eventually get taken over by MBA types who know how to juggle numbers, wear a nice suit, and lie to people, and basically nothing else. Because they don't know anything else, e.g. anything at all about the underlying products, the quality of the organization's output will drop steadily, and they will attempt to compensate by steadily becoming more and more evil.
It's not even limited to tech companies like ActivisionBlizzard or HewlettPackard, it can happen to manufacturers like Ben & Jerry's.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @11:10PM
But this isn't about quality. Apple and Google still make high quality products, that doesn't change the bad things they're doing.
I would say instead that any sufficiently large corporation will switch away from its initial mission towards profit at any cost. That doesn't necessarily sacrifice quality, because quality can win customer loyalty. But DRM, privacy violations, FUD, altering standards to support your business model, abusing your workers and your suppliers, union-busting, tax evasion... Once your company gets big enough, if the people in charge aren't doing those things they will be bought out or otherwise kicked out by people that will. There are no heroes, the top of any capitalist industry is occupied by companies in a race to see who can be the least moral and get away with it.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 23 2020, @04:10PM
In about 1989 I heard it this way. (not adjusted for inflation...)
When you get to $50 Million the bean counters take over everything.
When you get to $500 Million the lawyers take over.
Now, I would add something about the MBAs after that.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @08:49AM (5 children)
I never felt like Apple was the good guy. Their stuff was always more expensive and proprietary, even back in the klunky 8-bit era.
That seemed to encourage their users to be jerks because everybody knew you had to have more money to own Apple stuff. It was an extension of the attitudes surrounding cars, stereos, etc.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday March 21 2020, @12:10PM (4 children)
ALL the old 8 bit PCs were largely proprietary in design. There weren't many existing standards that could be followed.
Old Apple, Woz and Jobs Apple, had a balance. A yin and a yang. A technical genius and an evil genius, together they made a healthy company.
Woz left a long time ago though, and the technical legacy was slowly spent to increase profits.
At this point they're just another brand being squeezed just as hard as possible to make rich people richer.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday March 21 2020, @12:42PM (2 children)
Apple does have some undeniable technical wins, like regularly having the industry's fastest ARM SoCs.
https://www.androidauthority.com/why-are-apples-chips-faster-than-qualcomms-gary-explains-802738/ [androidauthority.com]
They are making a swipe at x86 laptops with iPad Pro (i.e. the ARM performance can rival x86 chips). Time will tell if they adopt ARM in other product lines, like Mac Pro. We could see a future in which Apple licenses from or acquires the companies needed to make monolithic 3D ARM chips, and manages to make ARM chips that perform 10x better than whatever Threadripper/Epyc/Xeon chips are available at the time. They could also pick up the x86 emulation [theregister.co.uk] torch and run with it, fighting the lawsuits they would get hit with.
Still, the squeeze is real. Nice new $350 tablet keyboards. See also Louis Rossmann [wikipedia.org].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday March 21 2020, @12:59PM
They'd need to quit spending their money to subvert democracy as well though. Neither seems likely to happen, at all.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 23 2020, @04:17PM
Apple definitely has always had technical wins.
Back in my youth, I recognized that Apple hired very good people. In the early 1980s during development of Lisa / Mac, I had heard it said that Apple employed the top 150 computer science well known giants. Over time I slightly drank the kool aid and had a sense that it was because Apple was somehow magical and better than ignorant people working on IBM PC clones. But then Mac users did have a few things to actually be smug about in those days.
When Apple moved in a different direction, and I moved on to Linux, over time I recognized that there was nothing magical about Apple. They had lost the magic. Of course, everyone thought they got it back when they bought NeVR NeXT and brought back Steve Jobs the messiah from exile.
Microsoft hired lots of good people.
Then Google started hiring the best of the best. Microsoft experienced a brain drain of people going to the younger, hipper, cooler company.
It became clear that a company with management that had some vision could hire bright people and make amazing things happen.
But I observed that true Apple fanboys (a few of which personally known to me) did not believe this. Apple had some kind of magical engineering. Their software was somehow better. (Even when it because obvious that it was not.) Their hardware was "better", etc.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday March 23 2020, @03:53PM
MSX [wikipedia.org] was a standardized Z80 microcomputer architecture maintained by ASCII and Microsoft. It used the same AY-3-8910 audio chip as Intellivision, ZX Spectrum 128, and Amstrad CPC (which is not a doorbell [youtube.com]) and the same TMS9918 video chip as TI-99/4A and ColecoVision. However, it was proprietary in the GNU sense because building an MSX computer required licensing Microsoft BASIC, which was not free software.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @02:16PM
There was that time a few years ago that Microsoft [deepfreeze.it] was caught trying to train up and insert a Hamas spy ring [ukmediawatch.org] into the US Army's "Serious Games" program for making training materials from video games, which Microsoft's PR rep Susan Bohle was overseeing. Saudi Arabia was running the world's counter-terror operations [globenewswire.com] and police forces [sott.net] at the time, so they were able to have everyone who talked about it fired from their jobs, banned from the internet, and put on a global terrorist blacklist of violent white supremacists.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by stretch611 on Friday March 20 2020, @09:04PM (1 child)
According to Google's philosophy this means that they want information about everyone in the world, accessible to them, so it can be used to monetize everything.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday March 20 2020, @09:42PM
. . . for government. For your own safety. To protect you from bad thoughts. Etc.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2020, @09:40PM (4 children)
Things like Single Page Applications (SPA) along with tools like Angular are the way of the future. No one wants a shitty, slow, server-side generated bunch of woo-tang that is reloaded every time you want some small data source. Like it or not, the old way is mostly out for anything that is data driven.
Static pages still make sense. For static content. Like diary entries. But dynamic content, no, it's SPA and progressive web applications.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2020, @10:30PM
Angular and "SPA all the things" was the wave of the previous decade.
Fortunately, I'm starting to see more people talking about server-side rendering, combined with JS loading the data-driven portions. That means the first request can contains a full page again, and the page updates can be served as HTML fragments, rather than JSON parsed and converted to HTML at the client side.
Static pages do still make sense, and hopefully this decade we'll not see so many static pages delivered as SPAs.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Saturday March 21 2020, @04:56AM
And made for XYZ browser only is also so very mod '90s. Remember the clueless "e-commerce" sites that wouldn't even display if you weren't using IE?
You wanna do SPA? Fine, stick to actual standards and interoperate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @09:50PM (1 child)
This isn't an either-or choice. It's perfectly possible to make a web app that works just fine without Javascript or anything fancy while using it to avoid reloading and provide a better experience if it's available.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday March 23 2020, @03:58PM
Provided the budget allows both. It appears that in many cases, the budget for a minimum viable product (MVP) allows for only a fully server-side rendered front end (with occasional progressive enhancement) or only a single-page front end, not both. And the following thought experiment may explain why budget-crunched web app developers end up choosing the single-page architecture over a noscript-friendly architecture:
I'd like to see how a web-based text chat client, as a front end to IRC or a replacement for Discord or Slack, could be made to work efficiently without client-side script.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by NickM on Friday March 20 2020, @09:42PM (9 children)
Yyu just have to look at CSS abuse like that art piece https://codepen.io/ivorjetski/pen/xxGYWQG [codepen.io] to see that webcomponent are not required for opaqueness!
The only reason the pale moon devs are writing this letter is: they do not have the technical manpower to support this nor anything else. I would also avoid a browser that wanted to ship it's own forked system library on a secure platform like OpenBSD.
The Palemoon motto should've : Palemoon, we are slightly better than old MsEdge !
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2020, @09:49PM (1 child)
Also explains why they (PaleMoon) wanted to disallow NoScript, because the user having control of what Javascript code runs on their machine is bad for, um, for, well, bad for advertisers?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @10:47PM
There is a fork of uMatrix called eMatrix for Palemoon which give you more control than NoScript ever could. I don't know anything about the NoScript ban you talk about, but I'm sure your interpretation is very wrong.
https://addons.palemoon.org/extensions/privacy-and-security/ [palemoon.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by shortscreen on Saturday March 21 2020, @04:52AM (6 children)
Nobody has the technical manpower to continue to chase such a brain-damaged and infinitely expanding "standard"
Goog is being allowed to redefine what the web and websites are so they become the only browser. This is bad. If you love goog that much that you only want to use goog-web in goog-browser, at least have the decency to give it it's own name and URL format so that I don't have to waste time dealing with a bunch of broken stuff masquerading as websites.
Palemoon is one of the few current browsers that hasn't had the UI reduced to hipster nonsense which makes it better than any of the MS or goog-based ones already.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NickM on Saturday March 21 2020, @05:11AM (5 children)
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Saturday March 21 2020, @02:37PM (3 children)
Great for you. That may be because you only used add-ons that affect web pages, not add-ons that changed/amended the browser UI (including, but not limited to those that undo earlier unwanted interface changes).
The vast majority of add-ons I use are the second type, and all of them broke, and where there are replacements at all, they are inferior because the functionality they need is not provided.
I couldn't care less whether the functionality I want is provided through XUL or any other technology. I do care when the functionality is not provided at all.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Saturday March 21 2020, @03:15PM (2 children)
Many years back, I felt similarly. I tried to retain my UI as much as I could, be it firefox, KDE or other applications. I spend spent hours to search the internet or dig into configurations myself. That is all gone by now. I feel having matured and being set free. First, I evaluate whether I can still achieve what I need after a UI change. If not, I look for a workaround. If that is not there, I go somewhere else, but I do not complain any more (for many things I have actually gone back to the command line).
Firefox for me looks pretty much the same, it used to look. There are the annoying tabs int window title but I can ignore that. Otherwise I have vertical tabs and good privacy protection. If vertical tabs were gone, I could live with a menu for the tabs. If that would not be available, I would go somewhere else.
Nowadays, I perceive bickering about the UI as rather childish. Yes, there are stupid changes, but admit to yourself that you have a strong personal bias against change (we all have, for good reasons). Once you can make that step much of the pain is gone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @10:49PM (1 child)
Have you attempted to manage your cookies lately?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Sunday March 22 2020, @10:23AM
Privacy is very important to me, however, again, I have given up on sophistication. Firefox allows to delete cookies and site data when closed which is good enough for me. I do close firefox once a day on average.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @09:55PM
The one add-on I really miss that required XUL is Tree-Style Tab. Well, it still works, but it can't display its own version of the top tab bar anymore. But the performance is so much better and everything else works fine.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday March 20 2020, @09:53PM (12 children)
We need to get back to Gopher[70]. Now.
Only necessary changes to original protocol are:
1. Support for UTF-8. Make it a standard mode. No graphics, just Unicode.
2. Support for ipv6. Maybe, ipv6 only this time. Allow only single source of all information for one page.
3. Support for encryption model not bound to authorities. End to end encryption. Use public certificates only when absolutely necessary.
4. Client fully controllable by full spectrum of modern input devices, (keyboard, evdev, HID controller events, gaming controllers, headsets, MIDI/MIDI2, ...)
5. Open standard, open code, defend minimality furiously from extending attacks.
Rationale:
Current web technology is at the final bloatware stage of cancer. It is perpetually dangerous to its users at both server and client sides.
Unlike HTTP stuff, simple Gopher could be usable in VR/AR devices because of it's reduced visual complexity. That's a critical factor.
You cannot afford to clutter VR/AR visor device by common web shit or advertising. Doing that could kill you.
Make it right, this time. Do not repeat old lapses of http.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Friday March 20 2020, @09:59PM (3 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2020, @10:15PM (2 children)
I loved reading usenet especially when google made a web front end for it (google groups). Unfortunately that eventually turned it into an utter spam shite fest that killed it. I've not gone there for years. If someone knows how to get usenet through a web portal please tell!
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday March 21 2020, @12:36AM
I used to access it through my ISPs Usenet feed using the KDE news reader. It was so easy to just download the latest posts in a bunch of groups at once, then read them without having to hit the server again.
And you could set your cache to not expire, so you'd have everything offline.
But once it became accessible via web browsers it was only a matter of time ...
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 4, Touché) by shortscreen on Saturday March 21 2020, @04:54AM
Asking for a web portal to read USENET is like asking for an automobile that shits in the street.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Saturday March 21 2020, @12:02PM (4 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Saturday March 21 2020, @12:39PM (1 child)
No. Because, those silly freaks now adopted UTF-8 a standard in
MinixFreaxLinux, filesystems and terminals included, instead of better options that were on the table.I hate UTF-8, but I am also a cynical realist. It's UTF-8 then.
If me did a new encoding for this millenium, it would be 64 bits per character, nearly compatible with all previous encodings by a couple of high bit markers.
Because, I am well aware of 64bit register loads are the same total time complexity as funny 8bit loads on modern CPUs...
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday March 21 2020, @03:05PM
Well, I'm glad you aren't. Because 8 bytes per character in text files would be a terrible waste.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday March 21 2020, @02:55PM
There's nothing wrong with UTF-8. It's just an encoding for code points in variable-length byte sequences. A very good one, actually.
If I were to make a replacement for Unicode, UTF-8 would be one of the things I'd keep.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @04:44PM
Easy for you "English-first" people to say.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday March 23 2020, @04:17PM (2 children)
DNS is also "bound to authorities." With what would you propose to replace DNS as a means of looking up the IPv6 address of a Gopher site?
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday March 23 2020, @11:57PM (1 child)
That's a good question. We have a plan to use nodelist mechanics for building up new logical networks upon new protocols.
And nodelists for gopher enclaves could be served well by a gopher itself.
Fragmentation of logical namespace to independent enclaves (zones), aggregated by mutual trust is good for users, bad for tracking.
Nodelist maintenance fits to git well these days.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday March 24 2020, @03:27AM
I'm interested, but all results from Google Search for nodelist refer to the HTML DOM as exposed to JavaScript, and gopher nodelist produced nothing relevant on the first page. What should I search for to understand your proposal?
Would this be analogous to the webring model [wikipedia.org] for discovery of personal websites?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2020, @10:02PM (1 child)
Stop using god dang "frameworks".
I can compile linux kernels at a fraction of time it used to take. Web? The same damn banking/commerce/media sites makes me nostalgic of the dial-up days.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday March 21 2020, @03:37PM
Pages loaded faster back then, but they didn't pull ads from dozens of sites on one page* and didn't have video in them all.
* I do pull graphics for some of my pages from other sites occasionally
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2020, @10:53PM
Does it require content to be hosted by Google, or give preferential treatment to Google?
Does it lock down technology in such a way, whether by patent, licensing, or NDA, that it cannot be implemented by free software or equally by all commercial interests?
Does it require some type of authorization or approval by third parties whose interests may primarily serve themselves rather than the public?
If the answer to all of these is "no," then this is just someone who is on the losing side of a standards war that most people didn't even know was happening.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @12:32AM
Google will make this required to view youtube?
IOW, they are about to walled-garden all of their user traffic without any of their users consent.
And of course because the carriers are not "common carriers" anymore, they will have no obligation to pass traffic from third party hosting. Which means that Google is now effectively in a strategic alliance with Comcast. The death and reanimation of the corpse of the Google is now complete. Comcast bit Ajit Pai, Ajit Pai bit Google, and the hoard in the Youtube stadium is about to be released.
"The Internet was a social experiment in the free exchange of ideas and information that failed." --History book, circa 2070
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday March 21 2020, @08:20AM (6 children)
Why do you need to write a letter asking developers not to use something? Because otherwise the developers are going to use it. Why are the developers going to use it? Because it makes it much easier to get things done. Without Web Components, a lot of web app development requires doing horrible horrible things.
> an open and accessible place that isn't inherently locked down to opaque structures
These new standards are open, not proprietary.
> or a single client
Nothing is stopping other clients from implementing these standards except lack of manpower. So we're really saying "Please stop adding useful features because the rest of us can't implement them". Which is unfortunate, but that's not a compelling argument. The same argument could have been used to stop image support in web browsers, because some web browser developers didn't have the manpower to add image support. Such an argument would have lost, as the current argument will.
> complex web page structures that cannot be saved, archived or even displayed outside of the designated targeted browsers
Web Components is basically for web apps. Web apps can't really be saved or archived anyways; e.g., what does it mean to save the HTML view for a Google Doc? Actual web content (e.g., static HTML) is not affected. Of course, websites can hide their content in web apps rather than using well formatted HTML, but getting rid of Web Components won't stop websites from doing that. They're already doing that anyway; Web Components just allows them do it in a less insane way.
One might object to web apps as a concept. Great! You are not going to stop people from wanting web apps.
Let's play devil's devil's advocate for a second. Say we really do get rid of Web Components. What happens? Web devs are just going to import a 5 MB JavaScript library that basically does the same thing. If you're a small web browser, the library maintainers will probably not bother making sure you're supported (it turns out that popularity actually matters a lot).
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Saturday March 21 2020, @11:59AM
Open malware; I'm not sure that's really better.
"Nothing is stopping other clients from implementing these standards except lack of manpower."
Since none of them have any ethical or moral standards, you're probably right about that.
"The same argument could have been used to stop image support in web browsers, because some web browser developers didn't have the manpower to add image support."
Yes, that's a flawed argument, designed to fail. The much better argument is because not all browsers have a display device capable of displaying images, and not all humans have eyes capable of seeing them.
Therefore images must always be optional elements, with appropriate alt tags.
"Web Components is basically for web apps."
Exactly why they shouldn't exist.
"Web apps can't really be saved or archived anyways; e.g., what does it mean to save the HTML view for a Google Doc?"
You really don't understand what it means to save a view?
"getting rid of Web Components won't stop websites from doing that."
It would be a good start, but yes, all the common browsers are loaded with other junk that would also need to be removed.
"One might object to web apps as a concept. Great! You are not going to stop people from wanting web apps."
True, it's computer literacy that stops that. Too bad it's in decline.
"Web devs are just going to import a 5 MB JavaScript library that basically does the same thing."
Which is why javascript should never be allowed by default.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by quietus on Saturday March 21 2020, @01:39PM (3 children)
There might be a solid argument for WebComponents but what, really, is the argument for ShadowDOM?
You can already implement any number of additional DOM trees in a single webpage through the IFRAME tag. The only real addition with ShadowDOM I can see is that you can make this additional DOM tree completely hidden in locked mode (there's a way around, apparently, but I haven't tested yet).
It's not like any ordinary user is going to check out DOM trees, so what is it? A clumsy attempt to wall off semi-proprietary code from other Javascript developers? An attempt to rig the search engine game just a bit more to Google?
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday March 21 2020, @10:19PM (2 children)
The same reason most programming languages have visibility rules, and why namespaces as a concept exists everywhere.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/16677331/469721 [stackoverflow.com]
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 22 2020, @01:24PM (1 child)
CSS rule to reset cascade should be enough, IMO. However hard it is (or not), it is still less of a pain than web components.
As for namespaces, for HTML devs namespaces are hard and the spawn of Satan, apparently. XHTML died that way (you don't have to make the whole document on parse error, but that's how it went). On the other hand @prefix and og:title and co. metadata still exist and nobody is complaining for some reason.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 22 2020, @01:26PM
*make the whole document invalid
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday March 21 2020, @03:40PM
Lazy kids should learn HTML.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday March 21 2020, @03:46PM
I'll get my coat...
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @04:35PM
Traditional structure or nor, the real reason to not adopt it is clusterfuck. Just read the whole thing that needs to happen for this to work, then read problems it causes, then read workaround for those… Holy shit, man. It was a nice little dream of custom components and ease of use, but reality is fucking insane.