Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/06/introducing-the-new-html-element-welcome/

by edent • 7 years ago

474 227 7 years ago

thehodge• 7 years ago

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

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• 7 years ago

No thanks but sensible alt attributes and hover labels would be a great start ;)

jjoonathan• 7 years ago

A familiar face in this brave new world of hamburger menus and hieroglyphs!

Crinus3• 7 years ago

Reminds me of this music video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4taIpALfAo

SketchySeaBeast2• 7 years 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• 7 years 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?"

gruez• 7 years 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

CodinM• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

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

Terretta• 7 years 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.

tannhaeuser7• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

inflatableDodo• 7 years ago

"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."

They really should have resurrected the blink tag and added a property for the number of iterations required.

DCoder2• 7 years 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/egl52...

Benjamin_Dobell• 7 years 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.

JoshTriplett6• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

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

moreira• 7 years 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.

giancarlostoro4• 7 years 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.

OnlyOneCannolo3• 7 years 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.

m0nty• 7 years ago

Chrome is the new IE

Some software houses who supply the company I work for, are refusing to work with anything but Chrome. So it really does seem like the bad old days all over again.

dccoolgai• 7 years ago

I don't really agree with the "Chrome is the new IE" sentiment. They participate in the Web Standards process the same as anyone else. That their voice has different gravity in the process due to the fact that they are often the ones pushing the standards forward isn't something they should be compared to IE for. Devs old enough to recall the halcyon days of IE know it was quite different...

robocat• 7 years ago

Hell it was Mozilla and not Google that gave us WebAssembly through asm.js

And that shows why Chrome is not IE... Chrome jumped in and supported WebAssembly even though they already had a mature equivalent (pNaCl) which they have now deprecated.

I just don't understand why there is so much hate for Chrome out there. Sure, we don't always get our way.

To me the Chrome team seems to listen to developers and users, and to put the effort in to follow standards, and to keep improving Chrome in ways that I care about as a developer.

IE6 did none of that.

userbinator• 7 years ago

There's not really much of a difference between the web today and the "Best viewed in IE" web, and that's sad

At least back then sites were not as reliant on JS, so I think that's one of the ways it was better; sure, sites often looked different in non-IE vs. IE, but you could still consume the mostly-static content (and what wasn't static was almost always ads...) Now there are far too many "appifications" of sites that shouldn't be anything but static pages, JS is required to render their content, and that JS is often very browser-specific.

kdazzle• 7 years 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.

I don't know - I kind of figured that was part of the joke - I thought it was pretty clever.

tannhaeuser7• 7 years ago

There is a difference though: when Firefox was launched, it was still possible to develop a browser from scratch (like Opera was doing back then), and hence lively competition. Nowadays, with WHATWG HTML's feature creep (the HTML "living standard" spec alone weighing in at 1250 pages and 13.3 MB as a PDF, plus tens of CSS specs all over the place, and JavaScript a moving target), that's infeasible for even a nation-state budget.

JoshTriplett6• 7 years ago

Firefox has rewritten its entire rendering engine, and its entire CSS engine. Writing a browser is incredibly hard, but not infeasible.

Crinus3• 7 years ago

I do not think it is impossible, Firefox alone has rewritten several of its major components at least once.

I see it more as a self-fulfilling prophecy and a constant stream of FUD from naysayers whenever such a thing is merely suggested (with popular topics being that it will never be finished, it will not be secure, if mozilla needs $500m/year how mere humans will ever be able to do it, etc).

I think that a lot of people nowadays forget that almost much every single piece of open source tech that existed since the 90s or early 2000s was started by naive young programmers trying to do something (have you seen KHTML's source code in KDE1?) without having assholes telling them they can't do it. Well, ok, they had some, but nowadays they are WAY more numerous and at the past they mostly came from (what was seen as) "evil corporations" so they were more easily dismissed. Today most people in open source (both users and programmers) dismiss most things that do not have some big commercial entity behind them.

gsnedders2• 7 years ago

(I worked at Opera a decade ago.)

Opera wasn't a browser from scratch, though: Presto was older than KHTML (and WebKit, etc.).

And really, starting from scratch ten years ago you'd just run into Presto's big failing: site compatibility! Websites rely on all kinds of asinine edge-case behaviour, and if you don't match the majority behaviour, users will leave your browser for your competitors (and site compatibility was, along with crash bugs, always one of the top two reasons for users to switch away from Opera).

In many ways, the vastly larger HTML and CSS specs are a massive boon for minority browsers: when I started at Opera, a large proportion of the Presto team were QA staff who in reality spent almost all their time reducing site compatibility bugs and reverse-engineering other browsers. HTML5 and CSS2.1 made to a large degree that work go away: there was enough movement to converge behaviour (including from the larger browsers) on documented behaviour that reverse-engineering other browsers ceased being something consuming large amounts of resources on all browser teams.

What killed Presto is a variety of things, and the growth of the platform was only a small part of that.

And as mentioned in other sibling comments, all major browsers have rewritten major components at various occasions.

packet_nerd2• 7 years ago

I keep seeing this come up, that it's practically impossible to write a brand new browser. This got me thinking, what would it take to make a better browser?

A browser is something that 1 out of every 2 people on earth [1] use frequently. That's a lot of people! All developers in the world use a browser. Lots of them really believe in open software. Some are 10x developers. A certain percentage are literal geniuses. Exactly one is the smartest developer alive today. I get that it's hard, but smart people mobilized at global scale hard?

Starting from scratch today developers would have better tools, modern languages, and a hindsight view of what worked and what didn't in previous browsers to work with. Wouldn't that make it somewhat easier?

Say the average person loads 10 websites per day, and a less optimized browser requires 100ms more to load each page. That's 415 million hours wasted per year. Say the average person makes $4 an hour, that's 1.6 billion dollars wasted!

If every browser user donated 50 cents, that would be 2 billion dollars. Would that be enough? There are 50 people worth more than 17 billion [2], would one of them bankrolling a new browser be enough? What would it take?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/richest-people-world-billion...

jefftk2• 7 years ago

when Firefox was launched, it was still possible to develop a browser from scratch

Firefox began as a version of the Netscape Suite stripped down to just the browser. The Gecko rendering engine long predates Firefox. No one has launched a full browser "from scratch" in nearly twenty years.

marcthe12• 7 years ago

Today is the last opportunity actually thanks to polyfills for IE11. Also it must be modular architecture using several independent libraries. Once one is done, others can use and aid maintenance. But it's still very difficult.

Too• 7 years ago

Feature creep seems to be a common failure of many standards. Bluetooth or usb-c to name some others.

World is missing a standard, a good and lean one is created, multiple vendors implement it, there's an initial year of minor incompatibilities but otherwise all is gold and glory, everybody loves the standard. Standard becomes immensely popular so everything supports the standard and worse - the standard starts supporting everything because every vendor just has this one small extension they want to add. After adding thousands of such extensions, suddenly the standard isn't so lean anymore. Now the spec isn't just a single RFC that can be read over lunch. It's a whole collection of documents with thousands of pages, appendices, mandatory extensions and compatibility tests. You need few people employed just to keep up with organizing the documentation. Vendor implementations start becoming incompatible because of too high complexity. Only a few big players manage to stay afloat and they probably like it that way because it raises the barrier to entry and they get to keep their position.

Edmond• 7 years ago

"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."

I agree that the monopoly power situation is similar but there really is a big difference between IE hell and today's situation.

There is a big difference between one browser having a cool feature that may not be available in other browsers, versus the leading browser strangling everyone in a stasis of mediocrity, which was the case when IE/Microsoft owned the web.

jakelazaroff4• 7 years ago

This is how you get to that situation. It's the "extend" in "embrace, extend, extinguish".

xtf• 7 years ago

Simply put: Don't write for chrome, write w3c conform.

Or better: Use standards which match most browsers at caniuse.com

richthegeek2• 7 years ago

That only works if everyone does it.

At the moment some people develop only for Chrome because it has the most market share. So they deploy their site using the <toast> thing and suddenly people using Firefox are wondering why things are broken. At this point Firefox can either implement the new feature(s) or lose users. And once FF etc. have implemented it suddenly it's on caniuse.com as "works in all modern browsers".

BlueTemplar3• 7 years ago

Even better : Develop for Firefox / Gecko in mind, and ignore Chrome / Chromium / Blink / V8 / Node.js

nerd7473• 7 years ago

If I don't like something, I'm going to talk about it. The plusses, and the minuses. You can't have everything in life and that is the way I veiw everything (although that has little to do with these odd new html tags).

013a2• 7 years ago

There's a difference between now and the 90s/00s. And its worse now.

At least Microsoft's overarching goal was just to get developers to use their platform, by making their platform as useful as possible (even if many of the changes were ultimately misguided).

With Google, there's some of this, but there's also some very clear "we're an ads company and we want the ad experience on Chrome to favor us as much as possible, without regard for the user."

bubblicious2• 7 years ago

I would say that anyone who has spent an extensive amount of time writing code that needed to work with IE6 or below would disagree with your statement.

SquareWheel• 7 years ago

There's not really much of a difference between the web today and the "Best viewed in IE" web

This is a shallow comment. IE was closed-source, cornered the market and then abandoned all development. They stalled the web for years.

Today all browser vendors are active in the standardization process, open or nearly open source, and collaborate heavily to implement the same features.

Any feature that "only works in X browser" is a result of one browser implementing a feature first, rather than the result of a browser monopoly. For instance prefers-color-scheme was introduced by Safari, than Firefox, and next to-be Chrome.

So yes, for a period of one to two months a site might have "worked best in Safari" as a result of this feature adoption. But drawing a parallel to a web dominated by IE6 is completely ignoring all context of the situation. It shows a complete misunderstanding of how the web has evolved.

dhimes2• 7 years ago

You must have missed the post where we all took a blood oath to stick to standards when we develop.

newaccoutnas• 7 years ago

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

delta1• 7 years ago

From the chromium forum:

"Intent to Implement: Toast UI element"

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/blink...

zaarn2• 7 years 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?

TeMPOraL2• 7 years 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.

spankalee• 7 years ago

This is the start of the standards process. Intent to implement does not mean intent to ship, only that an engineer want to start writing some code. It's the public signal that the team is interested enough in this idea to prototype into the Chromium codebase, but it will be behind a flag.

The standardization process will undoubtedly change the shape of the thing altogether, or it could not even make it into the HTML spec.

interlocutor• 7 years ago

Public signal from Firefox: https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/1138980859728531456

bubblicious2• 7 years ago

One engineer shared the idea yesterday [1] of introducing a new element in Chrome behind an experiment flag to play with and you are mortified that Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple haven't responded with an official position within 24h?

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/blink...

Tinfoilhat666• 7 years 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...

tln• 7 years ago

The <toast> element should be implemented this way as well.

synesso• 7 years 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.

tannhaeuser7• 7 years ago

Maybe MS wants to reconsider stopping development of Edge. I think it might give them a lot of positive publicity without astroturfing.

dangerface2• 7 years 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.

jl6• 7 years 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?

geezerjay4• 7 years 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/toas...

richthegeek2• 7 years ago

So if nothing else it's shockingly bad semantics. If Android called them Turds, would that be any better or worse semantically?

mstade• 7 years ago

I've read the explainer but I still don't think I understand what this toast element is supposed to do. Also, am I correct in understanding that it is pretty much useless without javascript?

bluerobotcat• 7 years ago

I never even realized that that's why it was named toast. I thought it was named after the act of giving a toast (a speech).

dangerface2• 7 years ago

Because it's cute and web standards need more tat.

thomasedwards2• 7 years ago

Completely agree, toast implies style and behaviour. That’s not what HTML is.

teh_klev2• 7 years ago

since when does actual real-life toast smoothly rise and fall again?

Perhaps the inspiration came from the Sunbeam Radiant Control toaster:

https://youtu.be/1OfxlSG6q5Y

Unlike modern toasters which rudely attempt to catapult your toast into orbit, the Sunbeam gracefully and almost silently presents your toast with the love and care it deserves.

ComputerGuru• 7 years ago

More importantly, the slider on it doesn't control time but rather doneness. It gages the reflectivity of the surface to determine how brown the item has become, meaning my frozen Eggo and my refrigerated sliced bread both come out how I want them without having to play with the dial each time.

But my, does it feel more fragile than my old Chinesium toaster!

ken• 7 years ago

OK, getting off topic, but: we had this toaster when I was a kid, and I hated everything about it. This is the worst toaster I ever used.

Getting it to engage was super finicky. I never saw anybody get it to work on the first try. You often had to whack it down pretty hard to make it work, while other times a light touch was sufficient. You could tell when someone was using it from across the house because you heard a metallic "whang, whang, whang, whang!", at various volumes, as they tried to get it to trigger.

Going up was super slow. (In his video, he shows it at "6x" or "12x" speed so viewers don't fall asleep.) Who would ever want that? It's done toasting. Don't make me wait 10 seconds to get my toast. Lots of singed fingers from impatient people reaching in to get their food.

The sensor wasn't very good, either. There was a razor thin margin where you'd get reasonable toast, and it was almost all the way to the "light" end. At even 25% to "dark", you'd get a block of charcoal. I'd set it all the way at "light", and toast my bread twice, if needed, because that was safest.

Lack of a manual up/down lever makes everything worse. It means you need to use the special "ONE SLICE" slot when you only have one slice. It also means if you see your bread start to catch fire (yeah), there's no easy way to get it out in a hurry. You could push the lightness all the way to "light" and hold it there (I think that was the official way), but that was unreliable. Usually, we'd just unplug it.

Also, as he notes in the video, the bread guides don't move so about all you can fit in here is a small generic white slice, and the outside gets as hot as the inside so be careful not to touch it.

This is the 2013 Mac Pro of toasters: very pretty, very clever, and a thermal nightmare. If I had infinite money and space, I'd buy one to show off, and never use it.

crazygringo• 7 years ago

The name is the least concern here.

But it's called a toast because that's what many UX people have called it for years, because it pops up and toast pops up. It's a specific kind of notification, not any notification. (There's also "butter bar" and "modal dialog" and so on.)

And yes it's behavior, but <input> and <button> and <select> and <textarea> define plenty of behavior too.

I think the big concern here is standards and process... not its name or concept in themselves.

mcgwiz• 7 years ago

Agree name isn't primary concern, but by your own definition shouldn't it be called <popup>?

ludwigvan• 7 years ago

But it's called a toast because that's what many UX people have called it for years, because it pops up and toast pops up.

Thanks for this, it hadn’t occurred to me why they chose this name

Eric_WVGG• 7 years ago

what?? I thought he was just snarkily referring to some proposal/tag that he didn't want to actually name, likely <portal>. <toast> is a dreadful name.

Doesn't anyone there remember when <bold> and <italic> got deprecated in favor of <strong> and <em>??

dmitriid• 7 years 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.

edent2• 7 years 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.

Vinnl2• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

We had exactly this with the <portal> element 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.

sureaboutthis2• 7 years ago

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

devbat8712• 7 years ago

Toast is the official ux name for a popup notification.

sureaboutthis2• 7 years ago

Using the name "toast" for this is equivalent to emojis and has no place in professional software and its specifications.

binarymax• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

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

hartjer• 7 years ago

I love it!

nkkollaw• 7 years 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.

013a2• 7 years 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• 7 years 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

privateSFacct• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

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

MagicPropmaker• 7 years ago

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

tempodox• 7 years 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.

Aeolun2• 7 years 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.

jerf3• 7 years 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

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

[2] 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?

edent2• 7 years ago

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

WorldMaker5• 7 years ago

I never encountered the Microsoft Agent in the wild.

Then you missed out on the silly games I wrote for it, or the way I got around having to speak my own class presentations by having PowerPoint narrate itself. (I wish I had more videos of that stuff that I did in school given that deprecation has bit rotted it all.)

Also, you never got accidentally talked into installing ~malware~ "friendly user assistance and downloader tools" like Bonzi Buddy.

jerf3• 7 years ago

"Also, you never got accidentally talked into installing ~malware~ "friendly user assistance and downloader tools" like Bonzi Buddy."

Ah, yes... clarification: I never encountered it in the wild on a webpage that wasn't specifically about the Microsoft Agent. I did have a couple of commercial programs that used it, though nothing huge.

It did require a machine with what at the time was a generous amount of RAM to handle everything that spun up to run that thing. Nowadays, of course, it would be nothing, lost in the noise of the fluctuation of your Slack window, but at the time, megabytes of RAM were still a pretty big deal.

It is true I never installed Bonzi Buddy, but I was aware it used the Microsoft Agent. ISTR someone thinking it must take a ton of programming to make that happen, and I actually showed them my animated school logo and how little code it took to prove the opposite.

jerf3• 7 years ago

"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.)"

This reminds me, one of the small enduring legacies of the 90s X-TREME! craze is that Microsoft still does a lot of marketing around the letter X, even today, like the XBox. And that goes back to ActiveX and DirectX being named in an era where that was intended to make Microsoft sound Hip and Cool and With It. I suppose at this point the XBox has transcended this, and is now just a name.

bubblewrap• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

vixen992• 7 years ago

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

vixen992• 7 years ago

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

stephenhandley• 7 years ago

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

dreamcompiler• 7 years 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• 7 years 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;

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Introducing a new HTML element – welcome <clippy>