Design-reviews Alternatives

design-reviews reviews and mentions

• Modern CSS One-Line Upgrades – Modern CSS Solutions
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jan 2024

  > 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.

• The `hanging-punctuation property` in CSS
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Nov 2023

  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!

• Microsoft Broke a Chrome Feature to Promote Its Edge Browser
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 May 2023

  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...

• Shoelace: A Web Component Kit
  14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Apr 2022

  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.

• It's always been you, Canvas2D
  12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Mar 2022

  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).

• Chromium: Permit blocking of view-source: with URLBlocklist
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Nov 2021

  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.

• It’s time to ditch Chrome
  12 projects | /r/technology | 6 Jun 2021

  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/))

• Tag Kills FirstParty Sets Proposal
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Apr 2021
• A note from our sponsor - WorkOS
  workos.com | 19 Apr 2024

  The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning. Learn more →