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Comment by richthegeek | Hacker News Reader

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

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I imagine that would be a notification that slowly drops down, then clips off and falls below the bottom of the screen

Call it what it is: a pop-up. You know, the thing we've spent years trying to block on the web because it's an anti-pattern that malicious actors abuse to steal clicks and make interaction harder.

A "toast" means a few words of salutation. That's the purpose of the Toast UI element. A user requests an action, the action returns a successful response, the user receives a message consisting of a few words announcing the success.

Just because you are oblivious to the concept it doesn't mean it's bad. It just means you need to learn something before blindly asserting that stuff you don't know and are not familiar with is for some reason comparable to dog shit.

The point is, "because android does it" is terrible reasoning for naming the thing.

It's exactly the point the author here was trying to make. Google does not control the web or define HTML standards in a vacuum, nor is it the focal point of the internet.

> The point is, "because android does it" is terrible reasoning for naming the thing.

That was not the point at all. The point is that the concept of a toast exists and is already widely established. Android is one of those platforms. That's it. I fail to see the point of bitching about Android as if that would undo the dissemination of this particular UI pattern. I mean, Microsoft adopted the concept. Do you expect to undo that by bitching about Windows 10?

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/tiles_and_toasts/2015/07/08...

Toast has been a thing long before Android: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop-up_notification

The connotations of "toast" as salutation are even worse here; hardly anything is similar between giving a toast and a transient message (that's in practice usually about failure, not success) showing up at the bottom of the screen.

Out of all the reasons why they could've named it "Toast", the most reasonable one to me would be "because it's another kind of a pop-up notification, and the phrase 'pop-up notification' is already taken".

> The connotations of "toast" as salutation are even worse here;

I don't understand your problem with the concept. It's pretty clear what it means and how it operates, and the UI concept has been extensively disseminated and adopted, not only in web-base UI and UX but also in GUI toolkits for mobile (android) and desktop (Windows 10).

Exactly where are you having problems understanding the concept?

>Exactly where are you having problems understanding the concept?

The concept is fine, I’m sure everyone understands that. The conflict is your assertion that it comes from the meaning related to “a small speech given while raising one’s glass.” It comes from the “bread that has been lightly re-cooked” meaning. Toast notifications would slide up from the bottom of the screen, then sink back down – moving like a piece of bread in a top-loading toaster. (The most common kind, at least in America, at least at the time.) This leads to bad semantics, on the web.

Here’s a citation from 11 years ago describing that: https://www.techrepublic.com/forums/discussions/whats-a-toas... I’m sure it’s even older, but “MSN Messenger” is my oldest personal reference, so I wasn’t sure what else to search for.

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