Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmsj | Hacker News Reader

I was expecting it to be done with Javascript, which is, afaik, how the horrible websites that tack a URL and a "this quote came from blah" attribution, work.

I hate all of this stuff and it is greatly saddening that browser vendors are not protecting us from it. It's like the pop-up-on-click days of old and it must stop.

If I select some text and copy it, I am taking a very explicit action. I am giving the computer a very explicit instruction. There is no room for interpretation. It must not disobey me!

View on HN

Yes, I got the idea from all the sites that do it using Javascript, but I wanted to post the example to ##security, and half of the people there probably has the browser set to "block JS by default" :D

It'd be funnier if you invoke 'sl' in their shell.

Definitely, I didn't even know that command :D - but I had to `apt-get install sl` on my machine first. Maybe just do a telnet to a nonstandard port on my server and then send special characters to do the animation? That could work...

Yeah, I didn't consider the fact that not everyone has sl on their machine.

It is a sad world we live in where some people don't have sl installed.

sl is horrible - I don't need to waste however many seconds just because I mistyped something.

I always install sl because it helps me. If I'm frustrated from typing too quickly/angrily to even get "ls" right, the little train breaks me out of my fugue state and I have to laugh and shout "choo choo!" in the office :D

>If I select some text and copy it, I am taking a very explicit action. I am giving the computer a very explicit instruction. There is no room for interpretation. It must not disobey me!

From the point of view of the browser, it very explicitly does what you told it to, without interpretation, obediently. The problem is that yours and the browser's opinions differ on what you intended to do.

Then it needs to adjust its worldview to match mine. It showed me some text, I selected the text it showed me. If its simple layout engine thinks I saw some text that was rendered hundreds of pixels outside the viewable area, that is its bug, not mine.

It's infeasible for the browser to know "what you see" in the general case. What if the text was in position, but very small and almost the same color as the background? Does the browser need to know if you're red-green colour blind? If you're farsighted?

Yes

That's a pretty narrow view. Sometimes I want a site to capture selections or right-click (think: WYSIWYG editor widget). Your beef is with the site owners who put that obnoxious stuff on their site, not with the browser that displays it. There is no limit to the number of ways a site owner can do dumb and annoying things to their readers.

Since site owners are often not trustworthy on petty issues like this, it would be nice if browsers would make an effort to protect from the more obvious forms of malice rather than telling the user that it's their fault if anything happens

> capture selections or right-click (think: WYSIWYG editor widget)

Why, no, not the same.

I think it is ok for a webapp to be aware that I selected some text, and which text, so a further click on "boldface" would have a context.

But it is not ok for a webapp to interfere with the text selection itself.

For instance, well-intentionned chrome always add "http:// when I select the url. It gets in my way very often and it is not what I intended: I did select google.com with my mouse very carefully, I do not want Chrome to be clever and add "http://. By the way, this issues comes from the excessively minimal UI: Chrome should not hide "http:// in the url bar, point-barre.

I do not use Evernote because it messes with my selections.

I have to use Trello at work but this bully don't even let me select a card title.

And the list goes...

"I have to use Trello at work but this bully don't even let me select a card title."

It does if the card is open, are you referring to it assuming you're trying to drag a card on the board view? I'd rather have that than sometimes it drags, sometimes it selects the text.

I mean that when I click on a title Trello assumes I want to edit it. It's that too hard to have a light gray edit icon for that purpose?

I can't double/triple click but clicking and dragging works just fine for me.

No my beef is with my web browsers for allowing obnoxious things to happen. They take stands on things like blocking popups, why not clipboard interference and context menu blocking?

At least in Firefox you can prevent sites from blocking the context menu. Preferences -> Content -> [Enable JavaScript] Advanced... -> Disable or replace context menus

If you're using Firefox, you can prevent this kind of behaviour by going into about:config, and setting the dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled flag to false.

Would that look at the screen layout to remove a span that is positioned too far to the left? Or just disable JS control over copy-paste, which doesn't solve this problem?

FYI, most of that bullshit "Read More: <URL>" injection garbage can be blocked by adding "tynt.com" to your favorite adblock extension. I believe it's already in ghostery, just not enabled by default.

If ever there were a company that just needed to be nuked from orbit, it's tynt.

There is a way to fix it: don't select text in document order, but only in visual order. Apple does something like this in their PDF reader. This would probably break things people do today, and there would be whining.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com