5 ms·

Users already have a lot of control over what sort of content they view on the web. They can choose not to navigate to websites they don't trust. They can choos

by least 4y ago

Users already have a lot of control over what sort of content they view on the web. They can choose not to navigate to websites they don't trust. They can choose not to run javascript. They can disable css. They can set the font size they want. They can modify the contents of the webpage in a multitude of ways. Perhaps web browsers should have more granular controls and easier ways for users to override the browser's default behavior of rendering things like they're asked to, but then wouldn't that be an argument for Emacs having its own web browser? Stallman's argument simply doesn't make sense. If I make my own website, I should be able to control what's on it. It's a user's prerogative to ignore all those things or modify it on their end to make it more usable for them. Is it user-hostile for me to, say, require javascript for my site to function? Maybe, but that's still entirely my prerogative as the person making the website. There's no obligation for me to make a website for everyone and there's no obligation from anyone to use my website. A person should be able to navigate to websites safely and navigate away safely since there's no way of knowing what the contents of a webpage are before navigating to it, but that's about it.

xcambar 4y ago
> They can choose not to navigate to websites they don't trust. They can choose not to run javascript. They can disable css. How do you settle on (dis)trust about a website? Just as you do with a person, there are 4 ways: * reputation (meaning someone else already visited it and had to pay with bad experience) * your own experience (meaning you already visited and were victim of the website) * intuition (very poor driver, full of biases) * homogeneity: a checklist of norms and conventions (can easily be gamed) So in any case, it's either very uncertain or relies on others to throw themselves over the cliff so you can benefit from their experience. So no, you cannot simply choose to not navigate websites you don't trust. It's just blind navigation and that's what most people, uninformed as they are, do.
- least 4y ago
  > So in any case, it's either very uncertain or relies on others to throw themselves over the cliff so you can benefit from their experience. Every human advancement has basically been a result of benefiting from other's experiences or insight. Sometimes you make your own individual contributions to human knowledge but you mostly don't. > So no, you cannot simply choose to not navigate websites you don't trust. It's just blind navigation and that's what most people, uninformed as they are, do. Sure you can. All the reasons you mentioned above are totally legitimate ways of establishing trust with a website. You absolutely can only visit websites that others have vetted, if you're someone so paranoid about webpages. Some people are pioneers and some are not. You cannot avoid blind trust. Society as a whole hinges on the notion that people's behavior en masse is predictable and generally not destructive. How do you know, for example, that the groceries you just bought are not poisoned? You can't. You can regulate things but regulations cannot be perfectly enforced. So yes, you absolutely can just choose not to navigate to websites you don't trust.
  - xcambar 4y ago
    All very good points. Trust is also a leap of faith, when that's all you have. I had put that in the "intuition" category of my first comment.
sshine 4y ago
If it were trivial for anyone to disable unwanted behaviour in browsers, you wouldn’t see so much EU legislation being passed, forcing websites to make useless disclaimers. On the one hand, browsers have a long history of breaking security principles. On the other, the web has been the most vibrant platform for enhancing user experience; the same commercial interests that RMS criticises have caused the world economy to flourish like nothing else. If Emacs had somehow become the most popular VM in the world, I’m sure we’d see a lot more skepticism of it. I do think browsers are more secure than Emacs today, because of the pressure of popularity. But the criticism of the web being captured by commercial interests applies just as much: you are not ultimately safe from the government when you roam the web, because the technology is largely controlled by few actors.
- reitanqild 4y ago
  > forcing websites to make useless disclaimers. GDPR is not forcing them to do that. That is companies futile attempts at continuing exactly the same abuse they have been doing the past decade. And they won't get away with just disclaimers for long: even Google has now decided to implement direct, easy and fast opt out instead of the previous tactic of making it as hard as possible. Source: I see a new, simple and easy to answer dialog every time Google ask me.
- eimrine 4y ago
  - drpyser22 4y ago
    You know that wasn't the point. If there wasn't as much investment in browsers and web tech, and as much money-making potential to motivate those investments, do you think the technology would be where it is?
  - sshine 4y ago
    The amount of bullshit jobs available is positively correlated with how well everyone is doing. I’m not sure how that impacts science negatively. There are lots of sciency startups on the internet.
zzo38computer 4y ago
> Perhaps web browsers should have more granular controls and easier ways for users to override the browser's default behavior of rendering things like they're asked to Yes, I think that it would be good, but still the specifications and implementations of WWW are bad and tend to be trying to make the company to control everything, like they say. Web browsers could be designed much better, although to compensate for bad specifications requires some messy details. (One thing that might help is for client software to use ARIA hints. They seem to want to use them for blind users, but I think they can help improve it for everyone.) Instead, they make them worse, trying to hide stuff from end users, trying to believe they know better than the end users, etc. This makes things difficult to control, e.g. you cannot make non-tunneling proxies for HTTPS and therefore you need to take extra energy just to decrypt and reencrypt the communications, and the WebExtensions is rather limited, and you cannot usually make browser extensions in C, and the way that some things are core vs extensions makes many things difficult to change. And then, they will add spyware and stuff, and other inefficient stuff. A web browser designed only for advanced users, who are assumed to know what they are doing, would be a good thing to have. (And, if you do not understand something, then read the documentation; programs must have good documentation, and unfortunately many do not, and that is what makes them difficult to understand.) > but then wouldn't that be an argument for Emacs having its own web browser? Maybe; they can see if a better one can be made. It shouldn't be a built-in feature of Emacs, but it could be a file included with it, and maybe it might help. Variants of Chromium isn't the way to make a better one, so it must be made differently. > If I make my own website, I should be able to control what's on it. Yes, but you shouldn't need to add all sorts of stuff just to concede to W3C's demand, to use Unicode, badly made HTML, etc (even if other file formats would be better, trying to serve them properly just makes a mess). You can use just plain HTML, but it has many problems, and CSS/JavaScripts just makes even more problems. Even if you can, it does not necessarily mean, that it is a good idea. > Is it user-hostile for me to, say, require javascript for my site to function? It depends on the site. For documents, it shouldn't. For some types of games, it might make sense to require JavaScripts, but it should be possible to view the documentation (and the link to the documentation) even without it.
- geysersam 4y ago
  > and you cannot usually make browser extensions in C Why in the heavens name... would you want to do that?
jhbadger 4y ago
But compare this "it's my website, I can be hostile to users with special needs if I want to" to the real world. In the real world many countries such as the US and the UK make having your shop accessible to people in wheelchairs a law. So you need to have ramps, or whatever to do this. We don't expect people in wheelchairs to carry the burden of this by requiring them to cart around their own ramps that they can place over stairs.
- least 4y ago
  I strongly believe in accessibility technologies and accessibility on the web but I also don't think any individual should be required to make their webpage accessible. Regulatory barriers ensure that only those with sufficient resources are allowed to have a presence in that space. The current approach, which are guidelines (like WCAG) that most corporations and governments take seriously is a much better approach.
  - ParetoOptimal 4y ago
    > The current approach, which are guidelines (like WCAG) that most corporations and governments take seriously is a much better approach. It was only this year I even heard someone in industry talk about WCAG and their manager treated it veey low priority. I'd wager most views that espouse "accessibility should be guidelines, not regulations" would 180 as soon as the person holding that view was affected by even the smallest vision disability and lack of WCAG compliance on a site they frequent.
    - least 4y ago
      > I'd wager most views that espouse "accessibility should be guidelines, not regulations" would 180 as soon as the person holding that view was affected by even the smallest vision disability and lack of WCAG compliance on a site they frequent. It's not from a lack of empathy and I think that framing the argument that way is emotionally manipulative. There is a cost associated with making things accessible. If that weren't the case we wouldn't have guidelines like WCAG that teach people how to make things accessible. It's not entirely intuitive so it must be learned which is an added cost. For the government that's very obviously going to be necessary. In the US it's mandated by law that federal agencies' services must be accessible. That's the scope that I'm comfortable with. The government is for the people so that naturally extends to all of its citizens, not just the able-bodied. Private companies don't have any such obligation to serve every person and individuals definitely don't. Guidelines are the right balance. You don't infringe on people's freedom of expression and you get iterative improvements on specifications that make it easier for people building accessibility tech to be on the same page.
double_e 4y ago
> Users already have a lot of control over what sort of content they view on the web. This is true, but if you want to use most websites, you have to give up a lot of this control in order to have any sort of reasonable experience (reasonable for most people that is, not a reader of Hacker News).
simonmysun 4y ago
I believe though the authors of the websites should have control on how the contents are displayed, it's still more convenient if the raw contents or the contents following a specific standard of delivery is provided. And that's what I did for my website, by providing markdown source via git and web. You actually got RMS's point: There's no obligation for you to make a website for everyone, but you could provide more convenience and compatibility by not _only_ making a website which needs javascript enabled. It shouldn't be assumed that everyone favors javascript and likes to execute javascript code from everywhere. One may argue that would be easy to be scraped by bots. That's another issue.
medo-bear 4y ago
> Is it user-hostile for me to, say, require javascript for my site to function? Maybe, but that's still entirely my prerogative as the person making the website but that is exactly what he is talking about - ie the culture of user hostility (and also code obfuscation) in js front end development
deafpolygon 4y ago
> They can choose not to run javascript. They can disable css. They can set the font size they want. Have you done that on "modern" websites?
- least 4y ago
  Sometimes, yes. I don't really find it necessary. A lot of the things I don't want to see on the web I handle by using an ad blocker.
  - ParetoOptimal 4y ago
    I know how to fix 99% of the problems that come up when you disable css/javascript, but it's not easy and is a huge time-sink. Most users turn off js, notice their favorite site broke, and conclude "if I disable js it breaks the sites I care about".
  - deafpolygon 4y ago
    I don't know about you, but most of the web applications online don't work without JS. Coupled with the fact that more and more applications are being moved online, I find that hard to say that users can simply turn JS off.
    - least 4y ago
      It's still a choice. I know this might be hard for people to believe, but there's still a lot of people that live their lives without internet and they can still do all the things necessary to live their life. If you want to use a web application, then yeah, you probably need to allow the web browser to run JS because it enables those things to exist.
      - deafpolygon 4y ago
        That's not a choice.
m463 4y ago
I disagree. This has been eroded in a continual and unstoppable way. It's annoying because years and years ago my view of computing was very very positive. I would have viewed something like web assembly as better and faster! Now I view it primarily as a way of obscuring what happens on your computer. We can see that web pages load and run fast enough -- it is just that most do not because they load the maximum number of advertisements and trackers that the delay will bear.

by least 4y ago

xcambar 4y ago

> They can choose not to navigate to websites they don't trust. They can choose not to run javascript. They can disable css. How do you settle on (dis)trust about a website? Just as you do with a person, there are 4 ways: * reputation (meaning someone else already visited it and had to pay with bad experience) * your own experience (meaning you already visited and were victim of the website) * intuition (very poor driver, full of biases) * homogeneity: a checklist of norms and conventions (can easily be gamed) So in any case, it's either very uncertain or relies on others to throw themselves over the cliff so you can benefit from their experience. So no, you cannot simply choose to not navigate websites you don't trust. It's just blind navigation and that's what most people, uninformed as they are, do.

least 4y ago
> So in any case, it's either very uncertain or relies on others to throw themselves over the cliff so you can benefit from their experience. Every human advancement has basically been a result of benefiting from other's experiences or insight. Sometimes you make your own individual contributions to human knowledge but you mostly don't. > So no, you cannot simply choose to not navigate websites you don't trust. It's just blind navigation and that's what most people, uninformed as they are, do. Sure you can. All the reasons you mentioned above are totally legitimate ways of establishing trust with a website. You absolutely can only visit websites that others have vetted, if you're someone so paranoid about webpages. Some people are pioneers and some are not. You cannot avoid blind trust. Society as a whole hinges on the notion that people's behavior en masse is predictable and generally not destructive. How do you know, for example, that the groceries you just bought are not poisoned? You can't. You can regulate things but regulations cannot be perfectly enforced. So yes, you absolutely can just choose not to navigate to websites you don't trust.
- xcambar 4y ago
  All very good points. Trust is also a leap of faith, when that's all you have. I had put that in the "intuition" category of my first comment.

sshine 4y ago

If it were trivial for anyone to disable unwanted behaviour in browsers, you wouldn’t see so much EU legislation being passed, forcing websites to make useless disclaimers. On the one hand, browsers have a long history of breaking security principles. On the other, the web has been the most vibrant platform for enhancing user experience; the same commercial interests that RMS criticises have caused the world economy to flourish like nothing else. If Emacs had somehow become the most popular VM in the world, I’m sure we’d see a lot more skepticism of it. I do think browsers are more secure than Emacs today, because of the pressure of popularity. But the criticism of the web being captured by commercial interests applies just as much: you are not ultimately safe from the government when you roam the web, because the technology is largely controlled by few actors.

reitanqild 4y ago
> forcing websites to make useless disclaimers. GDPR is not forcing them to do that. That is companies futile attempts at continuing exactly the same abuse they have been doing the past decade. And they won't get away with just disclaimers for long: even Google has now decided to implement direct, easy and fast opt out instead of the previous tactic of making it as hard as possible. Source: I see a new, simple and easy to answer dialog every time Google ask me.
eimrine 4y ago
- drpyser22 4y ago
  You know that wasn't the point. If there wasn't as much investment in browsers and web tech, and as much money-making potential to motivate those investments, do you think the technology would be where it is?
- sshine 4y ago
  The amount of bullshit jobs available is positively correlated with how well everyone is doing. I’m not sure how that impacts science negatively. There are lots of sciency startups on the internet.

zzo38computer 4y ago

> Perhaps web browsers should have more granular controls and easier ways for users to override the browser's default behavior of rendering things like they're asked to Yes, I think that it would be good, but still the specifications and implementations of WWW are bad and tend to be trying to make the company to control everything, like they say. Web browsers could be designed much better, although to compensate for bad specifications requires some messy details. (One thing that might help is for client software to use ARIA hints. They seem to want to use them for blind users, but I think they can help improve it for everyone.) Instead, they make them worse, trying to hide stuff from end users, trying to believe they know better than the end users, etc. This makes things difficult to control, e.g. you cannot make non-tunneling proxies for HTTPS and therefore you need to take extra energy just to decrypt and reencrypt the communications, and the WebExtensions is rather limited, and you cannot usually make browser extensions in C, and the way that some things are core vs extensions makes many things difficult to change. And then, they will add spyware and stuff, and other inefficient stuff. A web browser designed only for advanced users, who are assumed to know what they are doing, would be a good thing to have. (And, if you do not understand something, then read the documentation; programs must have good documentation, and unfortunately many do not, and that is what makes them difficult to understand.) > but then wouldn't that be an argument for Emacs having its own web browser? Maybe; they can see if a better one can be made. It shouldn't be a built-in feature of Emacs, but it could be a file included with it, and maybe it might help. Variants of Chromium isn't the way to make a better one, so it must be made differently. > If I make my own website, I should be able to control what's on it. Yes, but you shouldn't need to add all sorts of stuff just to concede to W3C's demand, to use Unicode, badly made HTML, etc (even if other file formats would be better, trying to serve them properly just makes a mess). You can use just plain HTML, but it has many problems, and CSS/JavaScripts just makes even more problems. Even if you can, it does not necessarily mean, that it is a good idea. > Is it user-hostile for me to, say, require javascript for my site to function? It depends on the site. For documents, it shouldn't. For some types of games, it might make sense to require JavaScripts, but it should be possible to view the documentation (and the link to the documentation) even without it.

geysersam 4y ago
> and you cannot usually make browser extensions in C Why in the heavens name... would you want to do that?

jhbadger 4y ago

But compare this "it's my website, I can be hostile to users with special needs if I want to" to the real world. In the real world many countries such as the US and the UK make having your shop accessible to people in wheelchairs a law. So you need to have ramps, or whatever to do this. We don't expect people in wheelchairs to carry the burden of this by requiring them to cart around their own ramps that they can place over stairs.

least 4y ago
I strongly believe in accessibility technologies and accessibility on the web but I also don't think any individual should be required to make their webpage accessible. Regulatory barriers ensure that only those with sufficient resources are allowed to have a presence in that space. The current approach, which are guidelines (like WCAG) that most corporations and governments take seriously is a much better approach.
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  > The current approach, which are guidelines (like WCAG) that most corporations and governments take seriously is a much better approach. It was only this year I even heard someone in industry talk about WCAG and their manager treated it veey low priority. I'd wager most views that espouse "accessibility should be guidelines, not regulations" would 180 as soon as the person holding that view was affected by even the smallest vision disability and lack of WCAG compliance on a site they frequent.
  - least 4y ago
    > I'd wager most views that espouse "accessibility should be guidelines, not regulations" would 180 as soon as the person holding that view was affected by even the smallest vision disability and lack of WCAG compliance on a site they frequent. It's not from a lack of empathy and I think that framing the argument that way is emotionally manipulative. There is a cost associated with making things accessible. If that weren't the case we wouldn't have guidelines like WCAG that teach people how to make things accessible. It's not entirely intuitive so it must be learned which is an added cost. For the government that's very obviously going to be necessary. In the US it's mandated by law that federal agencies' services must be accessible. That's the scope that I'm comfortable with. The government is for the people so that naturally extends to all of its citizens, not just the able-bodied. Private companies don't have any such obligation to serve every person and individuals definitely don't. Guidelines are the right balance. You don't infringe on people's freedom of expression and you get iterative improvements on specifications that make it easier for people building accessibility tech to be on the same page.

double_e 4y ago

> Users already have a lot of control over what sort of content they view on the web. This is true, but if you want to use most websites, you have to give up a lot of this control in order to have any sort of reasonable experience (reasonable for most people that is, not a reader of Hacker News).

simonmysun 4y ago

I believe though the authors of the websites should have control on how the contents are displayed, it's still more convenient if the raw contents or the contents following a specific standard of delivery is provided. And that's what I did for my website, by providing markdown source via git and web. You actually got RMS's point: There's no obligation for you to make a website for everyone, but you could provide more convenience and compatibility by not _only_ making a website which needs javascript enabled. It shouldn't be assumed that everyone favors javascript and likes to execute javascript code from everywhere. One may argue that would be easy to be scraped by bots. That's another issue.

medo-bear 4y ago

> Is it user-hostile for me to, say, require javascript for my site to function? Maybe, but that's still entirely my prerogative as the person making the website but that is exactly what he is talking about - ie the culture of user hostility (and also code obfuscation) in js front end development

deafpolygon 4y ago

> They can choose not to run javascript. They can disable css. They can set the font size they want. Have you done that on "modern" websites?

least 4y ago
Sometimes, yes. I don't really find it necessary. A lot of the things I don't want to see on the web I handle by using an ad blocker.
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  I know how to fix 99% of the problems that come up when you disable css/javascript, but it's not easy and is a huge time-sink. Most users turn off js, notice their favorite site broke, and conclude "if I disable js it breaks the sites I care about".
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  I don't know about you, but most of the web applications online don't work without JS. Coupled with the fact that more and more applications are being moved online, I find that hard to say that users can simply turn JS off.
  - least 4y ago
    It's still a choice. I know this might be hard for people to believe, but there's still a lot of people that live their lives without internet and they can still do all the things necessary to live their life. If you want to use a web application, then yeah, you probably need to allow the web browser to run JS because it enables those things to exist.
    - deafpolygon 4y ago
      That's not a choice.

m463 4y ago

I disagree. This has been eroded in a continual and unstoppable way. It's annoying because years and years ago my view of computing was very very positive. I would have viewed something like web assembly as better and faster! Now I view it primarily as a way of obscuring what happens on your computer. We can see that web pages load and run fast enough -- it is just that most do not because they load the maximum number of advertisements and trackers that the delay will bear.