17 ms·

Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

474 points by edent 7y ago

tempodox 7y ago
Hello! It looks like you're reading HN - would you like help with that? chuckles I foresee a great future for the <clippy> markup. So much friendlier than the bland <track action=spy> tag normally used.
thehodge 7y ago
With some UIs on the modern web, I’d love for clippy to appear and tell me what to do
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  It looks like you're having some trouble understanding the purposes of our many different circular icons with squiggly things inside them, would you like some help?
  - mschuster91 7y ago
    No thanks but sensible alt attributes and hover labels would be a great start ;)
    - JoshTriplett 7y ago
      That just results in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      How can we rehabilitate hover labels (and alt-text) when you would also expect a significant fraction of visitors using touchscreens ?
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  A familiar face in this brave new world of hamburger menus and hieroglyphs!
  - Crinus 7y ago
    Reminds me of this music video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4taIpALfAo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4taIpALfAo
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  "You seem to be having some trouble. The text over here is clickable, but the text right next to it, which looks basically the same isn't. Simple, right? I love 'buttons'!" "You seem to be having some trouble. I find clicking on everything randomly until you figure out what each piece of the web-page does works best for me!" "You seem to be having some trouble - have you tried using this website on a phone?"
  - svieira 7y ago
    Surely the last one should be: "You don't seem to be having _enough_ trouble - have you tried using this website on a phone?"
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      "Tip: Long-form text entry works best on a 5" or smaller screen!"
gruez 7y ago
The <toast> element might not be controversial, but the <portal> element certainly is, as seen recent discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19866584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19866584
CodinM 7y ago
...I do not need more new age HTML tags. If <toast> doesn't by default make a toast, it's useless. If I need to style it, I'll just make a <div> or <span> and do my thing.
- salawat 7y ago
  How brown is this toast, might I ask? And from whence comes the bread? The front-end in recent years has become an unintelligible mess between developers obsessing over toast (with no toaster in sight), and Hamburgers... Am I supposed to make a UI or order a meal? And <clippy>? Did the mischevious little paperclip finally come back to irritatate me by making the noise of tapping on glass from an LCD screen?
- organsnyder 7y ago
  That's fine if you're just worried about visual representation. But when you want to provide semantic meaning—for the visually impaired, search engine bots, and other non-traditional users—you want to convey more meaning than a div or span alone. Of course, there are other ways (such as ARIA attributes) to accomplish this.
usermac 7y ago
I read it—hilarious. Thanks. "move fast, break things" really got me.
Terretta 7y ago
Note, this is a sarcastic opening to a serious proposal — that Google not dump elements into the WHATWG HTML spec without user discussion and use cases: The way Google has gone about this seems to be… 1. Ooh! I have a cool idea! 2. Other people in Google agree with me! 3. Other Google projects could benefit from this? 4. Let's stick it in Chrome! 5. Oh, guess we should tell the community what we're doing. He thinks maybe <toast> is fine (pattern of a notification container showing up and disappearing again makes sense), but concerned how it’s been introduced.
- tannhaeuser 7y ago
  I don't see how toast is different from the countless proposals for new declarative UI HTML elements that have been submitted over the years, and ignored or withdrawn (such as menu/menuitem), other than it coming from Google (and maybe Google not wanting to expose that functionality via a JavaScript API?) The reasoning against new UI elements has always been the same - they're inessential when JavaScript is needed anyway. I think this incident should make it very clear to everyone that HTML as seen by "browser vendors" (Google) is a very different thing from HTML the markup language as used all over the world for personal, business, medical, legal, and cultural documents, and which demands community representation and participation.
  - geocar 7y ago
    > I don't see how toast is different from the countless proposals for new declarative UI HTML elements that have been submitted over the years The difference is that if Google introduces a new tag and starts using it, then every other vendor must implement the tag, or the [potentially popular] applications that use it [made by Google] will simply not work. That's not a power that "countless proposals for new declarative UI HTML elements" have. > I think this incident should make it very clear to everyone that HTML as seen by "browser vendors" (Google) is a very different thing from HTML the markup language as used all over the world for personal, business, medical, legal, and cultural documents, and which demands community representation and participation. Google is not a browser vendor; they do not sell web browsers. Google sell advertising, and it's absolutely critical to Google's future to get everyone on the only web browser that has crippled ad blocking and privacy capabilities.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
DCoder 7y ago
For another and possibly more egregious example, look at Chrome's <input autocomplete=""> handling [0]. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ar1qj1/x/egl52wk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ar1qj1/x/egl52...
- Benjamin_Dobell 7y ago
  Unfortunately, it's not just Chrome doing stupid stuff with auto-complete. The latest Safari (bundled with Mojave) tries to auto-complete email addresses using your address book. That's not at all a bad idea, except that like most things Apple of late, the implementation sucks. When you give the input box focus, it opens up some sort of weird dialog prompt, which pulls you out of full-screen mode if you had it enabled. Really messed up our 3D web viewer.
- JoshTriplett 7y ago
  The user (via their user-agent) should be in complete control of autocomplete, and sites that think otherwise are broken. Mechanisms to specify the semantic nature of a field are great; by all means, make it easy for a user-agent to know what to fill in. But "autocomplete=off" was originally invented because a few large sites (archaic bank sites of the same type that did browser detection and rejected any browser they didn't recognize) wanted to prevent users from using their browser to remember their password. That's not something the site should have control over.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    Ignoring "off" isn't so bad, though it could be smarter. Ignoring everything a site says about the nature of a field is awful. I shouldn't have to resort to weird hacks to get chrome to stop picking a random field on a form and pretending it's a username.
bArray 7y ago
As long as clippy isn't used to shovel adware, I'm down with that,
moreira 7y ago
The person writing this has to repeat frequently that they're OK with the <toast> element; it's quite funny how hard they try not to upset people. But their view of the situation is completely correct; just because this one feature might be useful (heck, when Microsoft dumped XMLHttpRequest on us that was incredible too), doesn't change the fact that we're now living in a web where Google does whatever it wants, adds whatever it wants to Chrome, and the web is at its mercy. If they wanted to add <blink> it'd get added and supported, and other browsers would have to follow lest they become incompatible. There's not really much of a difference between the web today and the "Best viewed in IE" web, and that's sad. There's a difference in developer goodwill, and of course things aren't as buggy as they were back then so it overall doesn't feel like you're "stuck" with Chrome like it did with IE, but... you are. You're just OK with it.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  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 in my office use other browsers (these were internal tools). It saddens me that people worship Chrome and yet Firefox has a lot more potential in some areas. Hell it was Mozilla and not Google that gave us WebAssembly through asm.js and other awesome efforts. Microsoft gave us AJAX when Mozilla reverse engineered it back when standards were not properly standardized which is why AJAX is so XML focused in the name despite being able to fetch other things.
  - OnlyOneCannolo 7y ago
    I try switching from Chrome to Firefox at least once a year, but the UI design keeps me firmly entrenched as a Chrome user.
    - tech2 7y ago
      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.
newaccoutnas 7y ago
Ah great, will reduce code bloat and the need for https://www.smore.com/clippy-js https://www.smore.com/clippy-js
delta1 7y ago
From the chromium forum: "Intent to Implement: Toast UI element" https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/blink-dev/Gl7FIKM5IFw/tA70X9ZIBQAJ https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/blink...
- zaarn 7y ago
  >Firefox: No public signals >Edge: No public signals >Safari: No public signals >Web developers: Positive (previously expressed privately; we've encouraged them to make their interest public on the WICG thread) So basically, nobody at Google talked to anyone about this, asked only google engineers and then pushed those mentioned google engineers to make postive comments in the standards thread? And none of the other browser know shit about it? What the fuck?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    The new reality, what people were talking about for a while now. Google owns the web now, they do whatever they want with it - and what they want is primarily improving their advertising revenue.
    - zaarn 7y ago
      Every time I mention that Chrome is the new IE, people on HN keep saying that it is not true because IE was bad and Chrome is good. Have these people and the google developers behind Chrome considerd that maybe they are the baddies?
      - yitosda 7y ago
        It was frequently said that /at the time of release/ ie6 was better and more standards compliant than the other web browsers. Then it was left to rot for years. Perhaps notably, it was actually faster and had lower memory usage than Firefox for a while (Firefox had many leaks). The issues were security, standards and NO TABS! ... Honestly if MS hadn't been so unbelievably deaf to users and web developers, Firefox and Chrome may have never succeeded. If Google doesn't completely screw up, Chrome won't go the way of IE. Maybe messing with adblockers qualifies?
Tinfoilhat666 7y ago
Google also proposes a new toggle switch control element for html. A lot of new stuff coming from Google. Will Safari and Firefox give up? https://discourse.wicg.io/t/proposal-a-toggle-switch-control-element/3620 https://discourse.wicg.io/t/proposal-a-toggle-switch-control...
- tln 7y ago
  The <toast> element should be implemented this way as well.
remyanair 7y ago
Clippy html tag for animated virtual assistant. That's cool. https://www.keralaholidays.com/ https://www.keralaholidays.com/
synesso 7y ago
I guess Microsoft's attempt to use their superior marketshare to kill web standards back in the 90s is too long ago for the irony of this to resonate.
- tannhaeuser 7y ago
  Maybe MS wants to reconsider stopping development of Edge. I think it might give them a lot of positive publicity without astroturfing.
  - dangerface 7y ago
    If google is the new Microsoft does that make bing the new google? I suddenly have the urge to try it for the first time.
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      Sadly, no. Any startups in the search engine business ?
jl6 7y ago
Unlike the author, I do not think <toast> 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 <notification>? Or even better, don’t add anything - it’s surely just a <div> that needs styling and animating with existing CSS and JS?
- geezerjay 7y ago
  > Why not just call it <notification>? In Android land, a "toast" is a particular implementation of a notification. https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/notifiers/toasts https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/notifiers/toas...
  - richthegeek 7y ago
    So if nothing else it's shockingly bad semantics. If Android called them Turds, would that be any better or worse semantically?
    - geezerjay 7y ago
      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 with is for some reason comparable to dog shit.
      - zylent 7y ago
        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.
dmitriid 7y ago
Another thing that scares me is how few people are involved in these standards. You will always see the same two or three people in the discussion of every standard.
- edent 7y ago
  I agree. It is mostly the people who have employers rich enough to sponsor them. Or some very dedicated amateurs doing it out of passion.
Vinnl 7y ago
I'm about as big a Firefox fanboy as they come, but... I don't understand the problem here? The Chrome devs are thinking about whether a <toast> element would be useful. They float the proposal early on, and announce that they will implement (not ship! Web developers cannot use it) it to get some real-world experience with that to inform its design. Still plenty of time for people to get involved, make objections, allow refinement, etc. Or am I missing something?
lol768 7y ago
We had exactly this with the <portal> element https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19866584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19866584 It gets shipped in Chrome (often without a W3C spec or substantial discussion with other stakeholders), and then other browser vendors are forced to play catch up.
sureaboutthis 7y ago
It probably would have helped enormously if they had given it a professional name other than "toast".
- devbat8712 7y ago
  Toast is the official ux name for a popup notification.
  - sureaboutthis 7y ago
    Using the name "toast" for this is equivalent to emojis and has no place in professional software and its specifications.
binarymax 7y ago
It’s crap like this why I abandoned front end dev. I’ve not heard of <toast> before and as other commenters mention, the semantics are terrible. Binding externally OS/platform specific behavior to an agnostic browser tagset is an abomination.
aitchnyu 7y ago
Out of the loop and unable to Google it, but whats the toast tag?
hartjer 7y ago
I love it!
nkkollaw 7y ago
Very clever move. All other browser vendors put a lot of effort into making their browser better, and <CLIPPY> could very well mark the end of Google Chrome's monopoly--with what I guess is a pretty trivial feature to implement, in comparison. I'm switching to Edge if I can have Clippy back.
013a 7y ago
Someone who knows more and is more involved with all of this stuff should consider creating a site that documents all of these times Chrome has either actively broken standards (versus just "not being up to date", which every browser is guilty of and more alright) or actively pushed new standards seeking to strongarm other browsers into support. It would be very valuable to have a clear list as evidence.
martin-adams 7y ago
I find it interesting that part of the reasoning for the <toast> is this: "Many libraries in a variety of frameworks implement a version of toast (see research), but the web has no built-in API to address the use case." [1] One thing I would love to see as a browser handled web standard is the cookie notice and gdpr opt-in for a given web page. Every European site has a requirement to include that if they use cookies or ask for personal data, but there is no method of making it a web experience across the web. Unless I can do this of course: <toast> <button>Accept cookies</button> </toast> [1] https://github.com/jackbsteinberg/std-toast https://github.com/jackbsteinberg/std-toast
dosy 7y ago
If there's a <toast> shouldn't there be a <dropdown> first? Or a <menu>? These are ancient and ubiquitous UI elements that people need to code themselves. I have not thought about it much but my feeling is why do we need any of these? Can't we just use web components? And another thing, there's a lot of traffic to CDNs serving popular JS frameworks, when are CDNs serving libraries of UI components (such as web components) going to become commonplace?
privateSFacct 7y ago
This example would work better if they were pointing out an addition that really sucked. Yes - google has been pushing web forward with QUIC and many many other elements. Seeing Microsoft and other pushing back on something like toast (IE was a crapshow of stupidity for developers) is ironic. toast is going to be welcomed. The problem is that microsofts additions are things like clippy or cortana in windows which few people want. Seriously, look at windows 10 and the cortana addition (forced in many cases) and ask -> did users WANT this, do users LIKE this. Toast is going to be picked up happily. If microsoft tries to jam Cortana down IE users throats they are going to be in for a rude surprise. The reason for google's dominance is in part because of how seriously they have taken the browser.
- josteink 7y ago
  > Toast is going to be picked up happily. Obviously YMMV and anecdotes isn’t data, but nobody I’ve seen here on HN cares about <toast>, and everyone seems to consider it more bad Googleism.
z3t4 7y ago
Some developers seem to think that "modern" web development is the same as using new features. (meanwhile they use old design paradigms and architecture)
uptown 7y ago
Clippy should refer to how every app on your smartphone harvests what's in the device's clipboard for their own perusal.
MagicPropmaker 7y ago
There's little difference between <toast> and <marquee>.
Aeolun 7y ago
Just for the record. I am not ok with a toast element. It has no place in HTML at all. I have a really hard time understanding why anyone would want it.
jerf 7y ago
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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoCiSRQGJX4 [2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/lwef/accessing-the-control-in-web-pages 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?
- edent 7y ago
  Wow! Thanks for the history. I remember Polly The Parrot - I think as part of an early MP3 player.
- 7y ago
bubblewrap 7y ago
"Fear not my friends! I don't work for MS and this isn't a real proposal." Bummer :-( Is there a free JavaScript library that does that, by any chance? I miss clippy.
- thrower123 7y ago
  I do feel there is a real missed opportunity in not providing a skin for Cortana in Windows 10 as Clippy. Although I always liked the little Einstein guy better.
soverance 7y ago
I never knew how much I wanted a <clippy> tag to put on websites until now... and I'm super disappointed this blog was a ruse.
khazhou 7y ago
I can't remember when/if I've ever seen a "toast" UI notification pop up, either on desktop or mobile. Somehow a UI that's very rare, should be in the standard? Esoteric AF.
jxdxbx 7y ago
Chrome is garbage UI-wise, is not faster than Firefox or Safari as far as I can tell, and everything I use works fine in both those browsers. I do plan to have the Chromium version of Edge installed for the odd site that might be buggy without Chrome and I think that should be good enough.
vixen99 7y ago
'Me and my colleagues at Microsoft have decided'. 'Me' as a subject pronoun?
vixen99 7y ago
'Me and my colleagues at Microsoft have decided'. Me - has decided?
stephenhandley 7y ago
honestly pretty devastated that there isn't actually a new <clippy> tag
dreamcompiler 7y ago
> I think the chaps at Google probably think they're the good guys. That they're doing the web a favour. That users love them. This. Apple is in this self-reflecting bubble too. Companies that start off user-focused and get big often become thoroughly narcissistic.
techbio 7y ago
Thought <toast> was about IoT light kitchen appliances. Turns out it's about asking will a person accept cookies. <clippy> element plus a $30 home speaker is the intended norm, except "Clippy" is now powered by the cloud, and our favorite foods have become digital identifiers.

474 points by edent 7y ago

Hello! It looks like you're reading HN - would you like help with that? chuckles I foresee a great future for the <clippy> markup. So much friendlier than the bland <track action=spy> tag normally used.

thehodge 7y ago

With some UIs on the modern web, I’d love for clippy to appear and tell me what to do

bryanrasmussen 7y ago
It looks like you're having some trouble understanding the purposes of our many different circular icons with squiggly things inside them, would you like some help?
- mschuster91 7y ago
  No thanks but sensible alt attributes and hover labels would be a great start ;)
  - JoshTriplett 7y ago
    That just results in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    How can we rehabilitate hover labels (and alt-text) when you would also expect a significant fraction of visitors using touchscreens ?
jjoonathan 7y ago
A familiar face in this brave new world of hamburger menus and hieroglyphs!
- Crinus 7y ago
  Reminds me of this music video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4taIpALfAo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4taIpALfAo
SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
"You seem to be having some trouble. The text over here is clickable, but the text right next to it, which looks basically the same isn't. Simple, right? I love 'buttons'!" "You seem to be having some trouble. I find clicking on everything randomly until you figure out what each piece of the web-page does works best for me!" "You seem to be having some trouble - have you tried using this website on a phone?"
- svieira 7y ago
  Surely the last one should be: "You don't seem to be having _enough_ trouble - have you tried using this website on a phone?"
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    "Tip: Long-form text entry works best on a 5" or smaller screen!"

gruez 7y ago

The <toast> element might not be controversial, but the <portal> element certainly is, as seen recent discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19866584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19866584

CodinM 7y ago

...I do not need more new age HTML tags. If <toast> doesn't by default make a toast, it's useless. If I need to style it, I'll just make a <div> or <span> and do my thing.

salawat 7y ago
How brown is this toast, might I ask? And from whence comes the bread? The front-end in recent years has become an unintelligible mess between developers obsessing over toast (with no toaster in sight), and Hamburgers... Am I supposed to make a UI or order a meal? And <clippy>? Did the mischevious little paperclip finally come back to irritatate me by making the noise of tapping on glass from an LCD screen?
organsnyder 7y ago
That's fine if you're just worried about visual representation. But when you want to provide semantic meaning—for the visually impaired, search engine bots, and other non-traditional users—you want to convey more meaning than a div or span alone. Of course, there are other ways (such as ARIA attributes) to accomplish this.

usermac 7y ago

I read it—hilarious. Thanks. "move fast, break things" really got me.

Terretta 7y ago

Note, this is a sarcastic opening to a serious proposal — that Google not dump elements into the WHATWG HTML spec without user discussion and use cases: The way Google has gone about this seems to be… 1. Ooh! I have a cool idea! 2. Other people in Google agree with me! 3. Other Google projects could benefit from this? 4. Let's stick it in Chrome! 5. Oh, guess we should tell the community what we're doing. He thinks maybe <toast> is fine (pattern of a notification container showing up and disappearing again makes sense), but concerned how it’s been introduced.

tannhaeuser 7y ago
I don't see how toast is different from the countless proposals for new declarative UI HTML elements that have been submitted over the years, and ignored or withdrawn (such as menu/menuitem), other than it coming from Google (and maybe Google not wanting to expose that functionality via a JavaScript API?) The reasoning against new UI elements has always been the same - they're inessential when JavaScript is needed anyway. I think this incident should make it very clear to everyone that HTML as seen by "browser vendors" (Google) is a very different thing from HTML the markup language as used all over the world for personal, business, medical, legal, and cultural documents, and which demands community representation and participation.
- geocar 7y ago
  > I don't see how toast is different from the countless proposals for new declarative UI HTML elements that have been submitted over the years The difference is that if Google introduces a new tag and starts using it, then every other vendor must implement the tag, or the [potentially popular] applications that use it [made by Google] will simply not work. That's not a power that "countless proposals for new declarative UI HTML elements" have. > I think this incident should make it very clear to everyone that HTML as seen by "browser vendors" (Google) is a very different thing from HTML the markup language as used all over the world for personal, business, medical, legal, and cultural documents, and which demands community representation and participation. Google is not a browser vendor; they do not sell web browsers. Google sell advertising, and it's absolutely critical to Google's future to get everyone on the only web browser that has crippled ad blocking and privacy capabilities.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

DCoder 7y ago

For another and possibly more egregious example, look at Chrome's <input autocomplete=""> handling [0]. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ar1qj1/x/egl52wk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ar1qj1/x/egl52...

Benjamin_Dobell 7y ago
Unfortunately, it's not just Chrome doing stupid stuff with auto-complete. The latest Safari (bundled with Mojave) tries to auto-complete email addresses using your address book. That's not at all a bad idea, except that like most things Apple of late, the implementation sucks. When you give the input box focus, it opens up some sort of weird dialog prompt, which pulls you out of full-screen mode if you had it enabled. Really messed up our 3D web viewer.
JoshTriplett 7y ago
The user (via their user-agent) should be in complete control of autocomplete, and sites that think otherwise are broken. Mechanisms to specify the semantic nature of a field are great; by all means, make it easy for a user-agent to know what to fill in. But "autocomplete=off" was originally invented because a few large sites (archaic bank sites of the same type that did browser detection and rejected any browser they didn't recognize) wanted to prevent users from using their browser to remember their password. That's not something the site should have control over.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  Ignoring "off" isn't so bad, though it could be smarter. Ignoring everything a site says about the nature of a field is awful. I shouldn't have to resort to weird hacks to get chrome to stop picking a random field on a form and pretending it's a username.

bArray 7y ago

As long as clippy isn't used to shovel adware, I'm down with that,

moreira 7y ago

The person writing this has to repeat frequently that they're OK with the <toast> element; it's quite funny how hard they try not to upset people. But their view of the situation is completely correct; just because this one feature might be useful (heck, when Microsoft dumped XMLHttpRequest on us that was incredible too), doesn't change the fact that we're now living in a web where Google does whatever it wants, adds whatever it wants to Chrome, and the web is at its mercy. If they wanted to add <blink> it'd get added and supported, and other browsers would have to follow lest they become incompatible. There's not really much of a difference between the web today and the "Best viewed in IE" web, and that's sad. There's a difference in developer goodwill, and of course things aren't as buggy as they were back then so it overall doesn't feel like you're "stuck" with Chrome like it did with IE, but... you are. You're just OK with it.

giancarlostoro 7y ago
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 in my office use other browsers (these were internal tools). It saddens me that people worship Chrome and yet Firefox has a lot more potential in some areas. Hell it was Mozilla and not Google that gave us WebAssembly through asm.js and other awesome efforts. Microsoft gave us AJAX when Mozilla reverse engineered it back when standards were not properly standardized which is why AJAX is so XML focused in the name despite being able to fetch other things.
- OnlyOneCannolo 7y ago
  I try switching from Chrome to Firefox at least once a year, but the UI design keeps me firmly entrenched as a Chrome user.
  - tech2 7y ago
    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.

newaccoutnas 7y ago

Ah great, will reduce code bloat and the need for https://www.smore.com/clippy-js https://www.smore.com/clippy-js

delta1 7y ago

From the chromium forum: "Intent to Implement: Toast UI element" https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/blink-dev/Gl7FIKM5IFw/tA70X9ZIBQAJ https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/blink...

zaarn 7y ago
>Firefox: No public signals >Edge: No public signals >Safari: No public signals >Web developers: Positive (previously expressed privately; we've encouraged them to make their interest public on the WICG thread) So basically, nobody at Google talked to anyone about this, asked only google engineers and then pushed those mentioned google engineers to make postive comments in the standards thread? And none of the other browser know shit about it? What the fuck?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  The new reality, what people were talking about for a while now. Google owns the web now, they do whatever they want with it - and what they want is primarily improving their advertising revenue.
  - zaarn 7y ago
    Every time I mention that Chrome is the new IE, people on HN keep saying that it is not true because IE was bad and Chrome is good. Have these people and the google developers behind Chrome considerd that maybe they are the baddies?
    - yitosda 7y ago
      It was frequently said that /at the time of release/ ie6 was better and more standards compliant than the other web browsers. Then it was left to rot for years. Perhaps notably, it was actually faster and had lower memory usage than Firefox for a while (Firefox had many leaks). The issues were security, standards and NO TABS! ... Honestly if MS hadn't been so unbelievably deaf to users and web developers, Firefox and Chrome may have never succeeded. If Google doesn't completely screw up, Chrome won't go the way of IE. Maybe messing with adblockers qualifies?

Tinfoilhat666 7y ago

Google also proposes a new toggle switch control element for html. A lot of new stuff coming from Google. Will Safari and Firefox give up? https://discourse.wicg.io/t/proposal-a-toggle-switch-control-element/3620 https://discourse.wicg.io/t/proposal-a-toggle-switch-control...

tln 7y ago
The <toast> element should be implemented this way as well.

remyanair 7y ago

Clippy html tag for animated virtual assistant. That's cool. https://www.keralaholidays.com/ https://www.keralaholidays.com/

synesso 7y ago

I guess Microsoft's attempt to use their superior marketshare to kill web standards back in the 90s is too long ago for the irony of this to resonate.

tannhaeuser 7y ago
Maybe MS wants to reconsider stopping development of Edge. I think it might give them a lot of positive publicity without astroturfing.
- dangerface 7y ago
  If google is the new Microsoft does that make bing the new google? I suddenly have the urge to try it for the first time.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Sadly, no. Any startups in the search engine business ?

jl6 7y ago

Unlike the author, I do not think <toast> 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 <notification>? Or even better, don’t add anything - it’s surely just a <div> that needs styling and animating with existing CSS and JS?

geezerjay 7y ago
> Why not just call it <notification>? In Android land, a "toast" is a particular implementation of a notification. https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/notifiers/toasts https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/notifiers/toas...
- richthegeek 7y ago
  So if nothing else it's shockingly bad semantics. If Android called them Turds, would that be any better or worse semantically?
  - geezerjay 7y ago
    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 with is for some reason comparable to dog shit.
    - zylent 7y ago
      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.

dmitriid 7y ago

Another thing that scares me is how few people are involved in these standards. You will always see the same two or three people in the discussion of every standard.

edent 7y ago
I agree. It is mostly the people who have employers rich enough to sponsor them. Or some very dedicated amateurs doing it out of passion.

Vinnl 7y ago

I'm about as big a Firefox fanboy as they come, but... I don't understand the problem here? The Chrome devs are thinking about whether a <toast> element would be useful. They float the proposal early on, and announce that they will implement (not ship! Web developers cannot use it) it to get some real-world experience with that to inform its design. Still plenty of time for people to get involved, make objections, allow refinement, etc. Or am I missing something?

lol768 7y ago

We had exactly this with the <portal> element https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19866584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19866584 It gets shipped in Chrome (often without a W3C spec or substantial discussion with other stakeholders), and then other browser vendors are forced to play catch up.

sureaboutthis 7y ago

It probably would have helped enormously if they had given it a professional name other than "toast".

devbat8712 7y ago
Toast is the official ux name for a popup notification.
- sureaboutthis 7y ago
  Using the name "toast" for this is equivalent to emojis and has no place in professional software and its specifications.

binarymax 7y ago

It’s crap like this why I abandoned front end dev. I’ve not heard of <toast> before and as other commenters mention, the semantics are terrible. Binding externally OS/platform specific behavior to an agnostic browser tagset is an abomination.

aitchnyu 7y ago

Out of the loop and unable to Google it, but whats the toast tag?

hartjer 7y ago

I love it!

nkkollaw 7y ago

Very clever move. All other browser vendors put a lot of effort into making their browser better, and <CLIPPY> could very well mark the end of Google Chrome's monopoly--with what I guess is a pretty trivial feature to implement, in comparison. I'm switching to Edge if I can have Clippy back.

013a 7y ago

Someone who knows more and is more involved with all of this stuff should consider creating a site that documents all of these times Chrome has either actively broken standards (versus just "not being up to date", which every browser is guilty of and more alright) or actively pushed new standards seeking to strongarm other browsers into support. It would be very valuable to have a clear list as evidence.

martin-adams 7y ago

I find it interesting that part of the reasoning for the <toast> is this: "Many libraries in a variety of frameworks implement a version of toast (see research), but the web has no built-in API to address the use case." [1] One thing I would love to see as a browser handled web standard is the cookie notice and gdpr opt-in for a given web page. Every European site has a requirement to include that if they use cookies or ask for personal data, but there is no method of making it a web experience across the web. Unless I can do this of course: <toast> <button>Accept cookies</button> </toast> [1] https://github.com/jackbsteinberg/std-toast https://github.com/jackbsteinberg/std-toast

dosy 7y ago

If there's a <toast> shouldn't there be a <dropdown> first? Or a <menu>? These are ancient and ubiquitous UI elements that people need to code themselves. I have not thought about it much but my feeling is why do we need any of these? Can't we just use web components? And another thing, there's a lot of traffic to CDNs serving popular JS frameworks, when are CDNs serving libraries of UI components (such as web components) going to become commonplace?

privateSFacct 7y ago

This example would work better if they were pointing out an addition that really sucked. Yes - google has been pushing web forward with QUIC and many many other elements. Seeing Microsoft and other pushing back on something like toast (IE was a crapshow of stupidity for developers) is ironic. toast is going to be welcomed. The problem is that microsofts additions are things like clippy or cortana in windows which few people want. Seriously, look at windows 10 and the cortana addition (forced in many cases) and ask -> did users WANT this, do users LIKE this. Toast is going to be picked up happily. If microsoft tries to jam Cortana down IE users throats they are going to be in for a rude surprise. The reason for google's dominance is in part because of how seriously they have taken the browser.

josteink 7y ago
> Toast is going to be picked up happily. Obviously YMMV and anecdotes isn’t data, but nobody I’ve seen here on HN cares about <toast>, and everyone seems to consider it more bad Googleism.

z3t4 7y ago

Some developers seem to think that "modern" web development is the same as using new features. (meanwhile they use old design paradigms and architecture)

uptown 7y ago

Clippy should refer to how every app on your smartphone harvests what's in the device's clipboard for their own perusal.

MagicPropmaker 7y ago

There's little difference between <toast> and <marquee>.

Aeolun 7y ago

Just for the record. I am not ok with a toast element. It has no place in HTML at all. I have a really hard time understanding why anyone would want it.

jerf 7y ago

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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoCiSRQGJX4 [2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/lwef/accessing-the-control-in-web-pages 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?

edent 7y ago
Wow! Thanks for the history. I remember Polly The Parrot - I think as part of an early MP3 player.
7y ago

bubblewrap 7y ago

"Fear not my friends! I don't work for MS and this isn't a real proposal." Bummer :-( Is there a free JavaScript library that does that, by any chance? I miss clippy.

thrower123 7y ago
I do feel there is a real missed opportunity in not providing a skin for Cortana in Windows 10 as Clippy. Although I always liked the little Einstein guy better.

soverance 7y ago

I never knew how much I wanted a <clippy> tag to put on websites until now... and I'm super disappointed this blog was a ruse.

khazhou 7y ago

I can't remember when/if I've ever seen a "toast" UI notification pop up, either on desktop or mobile. Somehow a UI that's very rare, should be in the standard? Esoteric AF.

jxdxbx 7y ago

Chrome is garbage UI-wise, is not faster than Firefox or Safari as far as I can tell, and everything I use works fine in both those browsers. I do plan to have the Chromium version of Edge installed for the odd site that might be buggy without Chrome and I think that should be good enough.

vixen99 7y ago

'Me and my colleagues at Microsoft have decided'. 'Me' as a subject pronoun?

vixen99 7y ago

'Me and my colleagues at Microsoft have decided'. Me - has decided?

stephenhandley 7y ago

honestly pretty devastated that there isn't actually a new <clippy> tag

dreamcompiler 7y ago

> I think the chaps at Google probably think they're the good guys. That they're doing the web a favour. That users love them. This. Apple is in this self-reflecting bubble too. Companies that start off user-focused and get big often become thoroughly narcissistic.

techbio 7y ago

Thought <toast> was about IoT light kitchen appliances. Turns out it's about asking will a person accept cookies. <clippy> element plus a $30 home speaker is the intended norm, except "Clippy" is now powered by the cloud, and our favorite foods have become digital identifiers.

Introducing a new HTML element – welcome &lt;clippy&gt;

Introducing a new HTML element – welcome &lt;clippy&gt;

Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>