Slashdot Mirror

Your Memories Will Be Rewritten: http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/memory/

if you don't know what a "good" URL looks like, take the time to educate yourself.

That is good pragmatic advice. But it points to a fundamental failing in the current architecture.

It basically means that every person must become proficient in parsing URLs themselves. They have to understand what the "http" means, what the resolution order is (why "facebook.com" is very different from "facebook.com.evil.uk"), to know about fonts (to differentiate ".com" and ".corn" or ".COM" from ".C0M"), to understand what character sets and encodings are (to notice other character substitutions), and to even understand subtleties of character sets (like the unicode "mirror" character...).

In other words, it really sounds like we're asking people to do the task that a piece of parsing software should be doing. That's asking quite a lot of the average user. This doesn't mean that there is a simple solution. I certainly don't know what the answer is. But I'm just saying that knowing what a "good" URL looks like is not so simple. I have sympathy for users who get confused. So anything we can do to help them differentiate good from bad is probably a good thing.

It's a pity they didn't replace the link with the original source. Changing the link to some other blog adds little compared to the original link (they have a link to the original themselves, you don't, that's about it), but the source of the story is what should be referenced from a slashdot link.

No, tab 1 is still the same site as ever, but the page you visited in tab 34 and forgot about 30 minutes ago suddenly looks like a facebook "you have timed out please log in" page. It's even used javascript to change the title of the tab and the favicon.

Pop Quiz! Were you logged into Facebook on tab 48, tab 18, or tab 42???!?!

All it takes is a bit of javascript inserted into a normal site using cross-site scripting, or an intentionally malicious site in the first place, or an adserver serving up whatever javascript anyone pays them to host. This is why I use NoScript.

The original author (not linked in the submission) points out that you can use the :visited hack to choose a login screen that the user would expect to see. And you can use various other hacks to determine if the user is currently logged into some site or not.

They've gotten a lot of (well deserved) flak in the past for linking a blog that links an original story, and I'm glad they're listening

They're not listening, the blog post they substituted is still just someone bloviating about the original article and proof of concept.

In action, it's scary in a way that just listening to some blogger yak about it doesn't get the point across, and the author points out how to use the :visited detectors and various hacks to detect if you've logged into a site or not to make it even scarier.

I checked out the featured "jetpack image editor" and how EASY it is to write such a complicated feature in JUST 14 lines.

Gluing in some one elses code is not coding: $.get("http://developer.pixlr.com/_script/pixlr_minified.js", function(js){ ... } )

In fact, how many levels of derivation could a popular feature possibly use, my plugin references yours, references a library, that includes another external, etc.. all because some kiddies liked another kiddies script ad infinitum.

How many dependencies on servers having uptime, and being secure? Imagine a world of plug-ins that rerference each other so heavily that a cat on a certain keyboard could crash everyones extensions.

Assuming that people can't do anything productive (such as thinking) while typing.

They can't.

Lies, damn lies, and all that. Too many unfounded assumptions to support your conclusion.

That's the kind of relativist bs that really annoys me. You don't explain to me what I got wrong in particular. Instead, you just sweepingly declare that the things I have said are invalid. Well, two can play that game. Your claim that I have made too many unfounded assumptions is pure bullshit. I've given my sources. If you disagree with what I have said, make specific claims instead of just declaring that I'm wrong. What are you, a politician?

For me, the "tabs on the side" idea is not bad, specially given the current "feature" of monitors to be of landscape form factor.

I personally have the Windows start menu at the right side, this gives me more screen space to read documents (PDFs, word, web) which are vertical in nature.

I know - to see what a bad idea it would be, just look at the screenshot of the proof of concept. Notice how you have to scroll to the side in gmail just to see you mail subject lines. Hardly a good use of screen real-estate.

To be honest, the sidebar is very Windows Explorer Active Desktop-ish. And the first thing many people do is turn off the sidebar.

I know - to see what a bad idea it would be, just look at the screenshot of the proof of concept. Notice how you have to scroll to the side in gmail just to see you mail subject lines. Hardly a good use of screen real-estate.

To be honest, the sidebar is very Windows Explorer Active Desktop-ish. And the first thing many people do is turn off the sidebar.

The old Mozilla implementation is flawed. The "technology" itself is fine. The new implementation is fine. MDC often contains stale stuff.

As for Flash --- its Javascript integration is a joke. Every call between Flash and browser Javascript is serialized to XML and re-parsed on the other end. No thanks.

If you RTFA, you'll find out that Ubiquity is really just a fancy word for "client-side scripting."

Its actually a little more complicated than that. It is actually attempting to bridge the gap between human language and computer searching/processing, albeit slowly and with baby steps. With such a complicated subject area its hard to design something with such a lofty goal immediately; its an incremental process.

The commands and argument parsing are factors sure, but there's also a system for adding new commands using a search-and-subscribe system.