My bank is detecting Netscape Navigator 4 & you better bet it’s a horrible experience for small viewports, & generally a buggy experience altogether (scoping other sites in my country, they are all just as bad).
This is also presupposing the Google doesn’t get its Web Environment Integrity (WEI) initiative foisted upon us allowing the banks to do the same sketchy attestation that they can do with apps from the browser--meaning they could deny you from running an alternative OS, disabling TPM/Pluton/Secure Boot, to having admin/root access like they block it on phones for dubious reasons.
Don’t care or are ignorant about why they should care (even when they “have nothing to hide”)? I think this part of the these conversations get lost. Consumers care about privacy, even if just at a surface level as we’ve seen the megacorps change their messaging to trick folks into feeling they are safer. These consumers just don’t know what is at stake when they do something ‘foolish’ like running not using an ad blocker, browsing with Google Chrome, emailing with GMail, chatting in Discord, hosting code with Microsoft GitHub, sharing their contacts with WhatsApp, tweeting on X/x-ing on Twitter, etc. When it comes to e-commerce, often it’s the only way to get items now & when it comes to banks, they’re all blocking root “for our safety” but users not understanding their value doesn’t mean there is no value.
Was the Kool-Aid tasty? But seriously, all of these megacorps are bad for our privacy on absolute terms & doesn’t matter if one is relatively a little better or keeping your data from another corporation since they’re hoarding it for their own advertising.
Unless you go the custom ROM + microG option that 98% of folks would never do… or you embrace the Linux phone OS which has no ‘apps’ (like that banking app that banned you for rooting your other Linux (Android) phone) & the telephony barely works if it even does.
I’ve had problems with e-commerce as well. Recently I tried this with Nike & the checkout phase was trying to read all my sensors, canvas, etc. were all being hit & failing according to the console. Disabling fingerprinting let me get ‘further’ but even disabling uBlock, something on my network was blocking some other piece of tracking spyware & I couldn’t complete the checkout. I reported it to customer service & later got an no-reply email response from their technical teams saying I should “disable your anti-virus, then proceed with the checkout, and reenable when the purchase was complete”. Funny since I don’t run an anti-virus on Linux just being careful but already having a lot of malware blocked by my system/router/DNS. What’s also funny is that you don’t need to fingerprint me to prove its me since I’m already on an authenticated account, so what are they doing with that fingerprint? Ultimately, I traded a Hong Kong pie to a friend to do the purchase on my behalf as he doesn’t care about his online privacy—and I got to add noise to his purchase history with my own.
When are we going to get e-commerce & e-banking to stop being so hostile towards consumers?
There’s not much to reinvent. They could have setup & hosted an XMPP server with MUCs & microblogged posts on whatever ActivityPub option they chose (or similar softwares).
They also mentioned their Microsoft GitHub forge to file issues. They really want you to create proprietary accounts to interact with them. You’d think a small web initiative would be led with small, decentralized/federated, libre software choices.
We should emphasize the “preferred name” option because it can be very expensive & arduous to change a legal name. Also using real names in UI/messages should be considered a bad practice because you risk leaking info to shoulder snoopers or dead-naming folks that don’t want to expend the time/effort/money for a legal rename. Just don’t.
A bonus to self-hosting is now you’ll have an XMPP server you & your chatmates & org can use for decentralized, federated chat—may as well add a new virtualhost & ditch that proprietary chat option.
Joke? Push notifications have a lot of valid use cases for web apps even if they are useless (or harmful) for web pages. The platform is shared between the two categories.
Ideally something like reStructuredText or AsciiDoc, both of which have a much larger feature set for taking notes where longer form is needed. I don’t really like the idea of embracing an Obsidian-only fork either.
Is there an open source option to Obsidian? This is the type of thing I wouldn’t want reading or tracking my inner thoughts. Preferably something that isn’t using a limited format like Markdown.
Criticizing utility-first libraries doesn’t imply that a) the only alternative is some component-based naming scheme nor b) that you can’t use pieces of both & definitely isn’t suggesting c) use inline style. I’ve used a mix of different system where appropriate for years now & it’s been a pretty good way to go. And you can still give the component a name even if you do mostly or all utility classes for your team & other users.
Everyone? I wasn’t sure. I doubt a fresh-outta-CSS-bootcamp person would either.
It’s ‘standardized’ within its niche. Niches can have shorthands, but breaking into mainstream seems a bit lofty considering the ambiguity from the outside (I’ve never used regularly) as well as how much & how far you can get with CSS without a library (not saying there’s not obvious places for libraries).
You could be more clear by writing margin-bottom-5, but then you reinvented CSS. And using shorthands for singular properties feels like reinvented CSS—especially since the name implies you can’t even refactor mb-5 { margin-bottom: 6α }. If you can’t use it to refactor, what’s its point?
My CSP won’t be happy to include unsafe-inline. Inline styles are hard to override. Not overthinking but I try to put some consideration for the folks using userStyles for their accessibility.
Naming things is often hard, but at least with UI you’re usually building something concrete so there should be some name—if not a wrapper that holds more loose parts you can’t easily control (like a #Content element around some reStructuredText output).
The cascading part is a double-edged sword tho. It can be used to great effect for good, but it can be unweildy with a disparate or undisciplined team. But it’s often better to work with it rather than fight uphill against the only style engine we have in browsers (if feasible)—the output will generally be smaller & easier to follow with less to know or maintain.
If you know CSS, you can write CSS. Sometimes utilities add indirection that’s harder to follow in the long term—especially with folks that aren’t already using these utilities. In 10 years, will it be easier to follow `mb-5` as medium border 5, middle box-shadow 10, margin block 5rem, min-block-size 10, mix-blend-mode 5, mild black version 5? If the utility has many properties tied to them (e.g. those softer shadows of layered box-shadow) named .stackedShadow--depth3 this sort of utility has earned its value that will be easy to understand why it exists vs. .pt-6 when an explicit value or CSS variable could have sufficed. This doesn’t apply to all cases, or all projects, but I would predict in 5 years the fad of pushing everything into a utility will be dead in favor of moderate usage.
It’s not a direct method, but really, you should try a) study the source code of the big ‘frameworks’ such as Bootstrap (especially if you dig into the comments & issues / patches that fixed worse practices with better practices) & b) hit F12 to start inspecting sites that are doing things interesting that you’d like to know about (but keep in mind they might not be experts & how you might improve it).