Current web standards are *a mess*

[lost_soul]

Recently, I had to deal with websites which prevent text being highlighted or selected. This presents problems for text-to-speech systems, which (obviously) must be able to interract with the text in order to read it. I use such TTS software frequently to listen to articles while I am doing other things.

When exactly (as a consumer of information) did I say it was okay for third parties to override or interfere with the functionality of my equipment/software?

 

Imagine if (when I tuned into a TV station), they gained the ability to increase my volume control, or disable my mute button during ads, or even reassign the buttons on my remote. As a content provider, you have no business even attempting to mess with these things.

 

Don't get me wrong, I do not blame the websites for these sorts of things. I blame the people who set web standards for GIVING websites this type of control. No wonder we have drive-by downloads, and browser hijacks, and remote execution of code that can take over an entire system.

 

Security 101: you do not allow an untrusted third party to tamper with or override things without permission from the user.

 

Thus, I propose a new web standard. It is simple and goes like this: by default, all you as a webmaster are allowed to do is serve me information or request information from me. You can load images and text. If I choose to, I can fill out forums and submit them to you. You are *prevented* from tampering with browser operation in any way without my explicit authorization.

 

I'm a technical guy and I know about NoScript and stuff, I just feel it is sad when I have to utilize such things to maintain the stability and functionality of my equipment.

Edited October 11, 2013 by lost_soul

[Fidcal]

Yes, there are lots of complaints over at fanfiction.net which I frequent. They have just implemented it on story text. The annoying thing is that it doesn't protect anything. Ctrl A still highlights all plus one can save the web page as html or text so what's the point? All it does is annoy legitimate users who want to highlight part of the text.

 

User complaints are that they need to copy a line from a story to mark how far they have read (bookmarks only mark a web page not a position on the page,) or people with visual impairment use them to convert to speech, others use select to translate into other languages or to look up a word in a dictionary. Another use is to quote when replying to reviews etc. It's immensely irritating and serves no bloody purpose whatsoever.

 

So far, it's not affected my Opera browser but someone else said it did. There's an add on for Firefox called something like rightToClick or somesuch. Then I think someone mentioned GreaseMonkey or some other Monkey for Chrome.

[Serpentine]

Thank Google.

 

For making so much of the new mess.

[Springheel]

Imagine if (when I tuned into a TV station), they gained the ability to increase my volume control, or disable my mute button during ads, or even reassign the buttons on my remote. As a content provider, you have no business even attempting to mess with these things.

 

DVDs do this kind of thing all the time, disabling your fast forward keys during previews that they insist you watch.

[lost_soul]

I've seen this feature today where you can real-time preview 3D models on a site right in the browser without having to download, extract and load them up into your 3D software. You can rotate around, pan, zoom, etc. Damn, that's amazing!

 

http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/55861

 

Also, when DVDs came around, part of the major selling point was that you were able to quickly skip segments easily. Talk about a bait and switch! Let's not kid ourselves though, that sort of thing is okay to do as long as you're rich and powerful.

Edited November 16, 2013 by lost_soul

[lost_soul]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2155820/online-advertising-poses-significant-security-privacy-risks-to-users-us-senate-report-says.html Edited May 15, 2014 by lost_soul

[Briareos H]

http://www.pcworld.c...eport-says.html

Ads- and tracker-blocking plugins such as Ghostery are a godsend in that regard.

 

About your original post, I agree with some reservations. The ability to execute local code provided by the server is crucial for rich interactive experiences. Without it you wouldn't get the blender website you linked to just two posts ago. Playing unity games in the browser requires hooking keyboard and mouse events and that's not a bad thing per se.

It's just that, as you wrote, the original standards and first implementations of JavaScript were a wild mess. All of it, good or bad, survived until today without anyone intervening and imposing healthy rules to JS interpreters such as not getting to hook the mouse actions / go fullscreen / play sounds / access the filesystem unless a flag has been set by the user.

 

And I certainly wouldn't blame Google for that, like Serpentine did. Chrome has been more and more about setting up sandboxes for scripts to execute safely in. Still, remnants of old times such as scripts preventing right-clicking or highlighting in standard HTML content could have been tackled by them long ago.