design-reviews VS standards-positions

> The other value of pretty specifically addresses preventing orphans and can be more broadly applied. The algorithm behind pretty will evaluate the last four lines in a text block to work out adjustments as needed to ensure the last line has two or more words.

This is very, very badly wrong. `text-wrap-style: pretty` is explicitly not about orphans and does not have a defined algorithm. It’s about prettiness, a subjective thing that will have different interpretations in different browsers and over time, and this is extremely deliberate. What the author has described is what Chromium has implemented at this time.

All the spec says is <https://www.w3.org/TR/css-text-4/#valdef-text-wrap-style-pre...>, that `text-wrap-style: pretty` “Specifies the UA should bias for better layout over speed, and is expected to consider multiple lines, when making break decisions. Otherwise equivalent to auto”.

TAG review of the feature requested that implementers use at least two heuristics, “to avoid authors using it as a proxy for a more specific thing” <https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/864#issuecom...>.

For total clarity: ‘pretty’ is not necessarily any different from ‘auto’, and ‘auto’ is permitted to do exactly the same thing as ‘pretty’ does, and I hope and expect that browser makers will eventually go that direction for most contexts (contenteditable/ being the main exception, and maybe lower-powered platforms). If you explicitly want a greedy/first-fit technique, use `text-wrap: stable`. Firefox has had a bug open for 13 years where shifting in this direction and using Knuth–Plass almost everywhere has been seriously contemplated <<a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=630181" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=630181</a>>, long before text-wrap-style.

CSS specs are explicitly not interested in prescribing TeX-level control; text-wrap-style is a good example of this: it’s just hints, with the actual algorithms completely UA-defined. And in fact, they’re going out of their way to recommend including multiple distinct heuristics of prettiness, so that developers don’t use it as a proxy for just one thing and start relying on something that is explicitly and deliberately undefined. <https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/864#issuecom...> (And Chromium has done just this: <https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=143279...>.)

In other words: you’ve already lost!

Since people seemed to believing Google PR at face value here is the w3c position in rejecting the proposal:

The intention of the Topics API is to enable high level interests of web users to be shared with third parties in a privacy-preserving way in order to enable targeted advertising, while also protecting users from unwanted tracking and profiling. The TAG's initial view is that this API does not achieve these goals as specified.

The Topics API as proposed puts the browser in a position of sharing information about the user, derived from their browsing history, with any site that can call the API. This is done in such a way that the user has no fine-grained control over what is revealed, and in what context, or to which parties. It also seems likely that a user would struggle to understand what is even happening; data is gathered and sent behind the scenes, quite opaquely. This goes against the principle of enhancing the user's control, and we believe is not appropriate behaviour for any software purporting to be an agent of a web user.

The responses to the proposal from Webkit and Mozilla highlight the tradeoffs between serving a diverse global population, and adequately protecting the identities of individuals in a given population. Shortcomings on neither side of these tradeoffs are acceptable for web platform technologies.

It's also clear from the positions shared by Mozilla and Webkit that there is a lack of multi-stakeholder support. We remain concerned about fragmentation of the user experience if the Topics API is implemented in a limited number of browsers, and sites that wish to use it prevent access to users of browsers without it (a different scenario from the user having disabled it in settings).

We are particularly concerned by the opportunities for sites to use additional data gathered over time by the Topics API in conjunction with other data gathered about a site visitor, either via other APIs, via out of band means, and/or via existing tracking technologies in place at the same time, such as fingerprinting.

We appreciate the in-depth privacy analyses of the API that have been done so far by Google and by Mozilla. If work on this API is to proceed, it would benefit from further analysis by one or more independant (non-browser engine or adtech) parties.

Further, if the API were both effective and privacy-preserving, it could nonetheless be used to customise content in a discriminatory manner, using stereotypes, inferences or assumptions based on the topics revealed (eg. a topic could be used - accurately or not - to infer a protected characteristic, which is thereby used in selecting an advert to show). Relatedly, there is no binary assessment that can be made over whether a topic is "sensitive" or not. This can vary depending on context, the circumstances of the person it relates to, as well as change over time for the same person.

Giving the web user access to browser settings to configure which topics can be observed and sent, and from/to which parties, would be a necessary addition to an API such as this, and go some way towards restoring agency of the user, but is by no means sufficient. People can become vulnerable in ways they do not expect, and without notice. People cannot be expected to have a full understanding of every possible topic in the taxonomy as it relates to their personal circumstances, nor of the immediate or knock-on effects of sharing this data with sites and advertisers, and nor can they be expected to continually revise their browser settings as their personal or global circumstances change.

A portion of topics returned by the API are proposed to be randomised, in part to enable plausible deniability of the results. The usefulness of this mitigation may be limited in practice; an individual who wants to explain away an inappropriate ad served on a shared computer cannot be expected to understand the low level workings of a specific browser API in a contentious, dangerous or embarrassing situation (assuming a general cultural awareness of the idea of targeted ads being served based on your online activities or even being "listened to" by your devices, which does not exist everywhere, but is certainly pervasive in some places/communities).

While we appreciate the efforts that have gone into this proposal aiming to iteratively improve the privacy-preserving possibilities of targeted advertising, ultimately it falls short. In summary, the proposed API appears to maintain the status quo of inappropriate surveillence on the web, and we do not want to see it proceed further.

https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/726#issuecom...

Ah, I didn't realize this wasn't solved -- a quick search turns up:

- https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/issues/788

- https://github.com/w3c/DOM-Parsing/issues/58

- https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/494

- https://web.dev/declarative-shadow-dom

In pre-render they seem to have started in this direction extremely recently:

https://github.com/prerender/prerender/pull/731/files

I don't use prerender so I can't definitively speak to it being solved and hiccup-free, but I think that limitation is going to go away in the future.

There was a ton of work across browser vendors to make this a part of spec:

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/canvas.html#the-canva...

It's all there. It's all official. That github page was just one part of reaching consensus. There's also TAG review:

https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/627

FWIW Mozilla and Safari signed off on all of these changes at some point in time somewhere, hence why it's allowed to be part of spec. There were some changes that were not allowed to be part of the new API because one of those two said no (like perspective transforms, conic curves).

I would like to quote from the W3C TAG comments on the Managed Device Web API:

https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/606#issuecom...

> > "NOTE: [RFC7258] treats pervasive monitoring as an attack, but it doesn’t apply to managed devices."

> We don't think this is adequate. Given the power dynamics at play in an employer-employee relationship, the UA should still be working in the best interests of the end-user (the employee) even if the device being used is managed by an administrator. That is to say, pervasive monitoring is never a feature.

Chrome may not consider it part of the "web-exposed platform", since the code doesn't live in blink/, but the same logic applies to view-source. The needs of the users are more important than the security theatre you wish to put on for their teacher's benefit.

One case directly related to Chrome browser, and sending data to Google, there is issue with tracking headers. [source](https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/467#issuecomment-581944600)This allows tracking specific Chrome instance among all Google services.We cannot say whether this is used for tracking, but it allows it for sure.\[Register article about the same matter.\]([https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2020/02/05/google\_chrome\_id\_numbers/](https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2020/02/05/google_chrome_id_numbers/))

You can check why Mozilla and Apple have opted to not support this.

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154

https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/28

Neither Mozilla or Webkit are satisfied that the proposal is safe by default, and contains footguns for the user that can be pretty destructive.

FWIW Mozilla updated their position on Web Serial API to "neutral" and clarified that they might be okay with enabling the API with an add-on.

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webserial

Allowing serial but not HID would be really strange. With HID you get standard identifiers that let you filter out devices that are too dangerous for the web. With serial you get nothing. Even if you know a device is dangerous, there's no way to protect users from it.

Hasn't FireFox been dragging their asses on @scope? https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/472

It took years to just convince them of the need for it. And I'm not sure anyone got convinced vs Chrome had already shipped it and Safari has it planned so they caved in.

Hard to believe FireFox used to be a leader of the modern web.

As mentioned by others, OK idea, but not a fan that this isn't standardized. After a quick search+peruse, these seem to indicate that it's not around the corner either. Happy (/hope) to be corrected.

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/4180

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/990

Mozilla's position on these specs is nicely outlined publicly and transparently as part of their standards-positions project: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/100

I'm kinda glad it's not implemented in my browser, to be honest, because the whole thing seems like a security nightmare.

It's a shame it impacts some hobby usecases, but I don't think this outweighs the reasoning set out on the GitHub issue.

This should have big warnings on it. Some of these are not web standards; they are features implemented unilaterally by Google in Blink that have been explicitly rejected by both Mozilla and Apple on privacy and security grounds.

Take Web Bluetooth, for example:

Mozilla:

> This model is unsustainable and presents a significant risk to users and their devices.

— https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth

Apple:

> Here are some examples of features we have decided to not yet implement due to fingerprinting, security, and other concerns, and where we do not yet see a path to resolving those concerns

— https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/

This is Microsoft’s Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish bullshit applied to the web platform by Google. Google keeps implementing these things despite all other major rendering engines rejecting them, convinces people that they are part of the web, resulting in sites like this, then people start asking why Firefox and Safari are “missing functionality”. These are not part of the web platform, they are Google APIs that have been explicitly rejected.

Is BLE a PWA requirement? I think they explained their position pretty well here, regardless of whether I agree:

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/95#iss...

I took a glance at Can I Use what the difference between the last public release of Firefox and Chrome is [1] and they don't really have that big of a difference in the eyes of normal use-cases? Some of these aren't implemented purely because of privacy reasons, the proposals aren't finished yet or complexity [2].

Why would Firefox need to change to Chromium engine? The only websites I notice that don't work with Firefox is because of user-agent targetting or just putting 5-second time-outs in Youtube code on non-chrome webbrowsers [3].

Can you give some examples of websites not working on Firefox?

[1] https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+120%2Cfirefox+121&compar...

[2] https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

[3] https://www.neowin.net/news/youtube-seemingly-intentionally-...

Mozilla are dragging their heels on @scope:

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/472

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/implement-css-scope-rul...

Someone who clearly didn't get it was wasting three years time "well actually"ing everything. The latest news is "it's worth prototyping". Meanwhile Chrome has released it(steam rolled?) and Safari has it in tech preview.

I question if FireFox has the resources to keep up with the pace of the modern web.