The person writing this has to repeat frequently that they're OK with the <toast> element; it's quite funny how hard they try not to upset people.
But their view of the situation is completely correct; just because this one feature might be useful (heck, when Microsoft dumped XMLHttpRequest on us that was incredible too), doesn't change the fact that we're now living in a web where Google does whatever it wants, adds whatever it wants to Chrome, and the web is at its mercy. If they wanted to add <blink> it'd get added and supported, and other browsers would have to follow lest they become incompatible.
There's not really much of a difference between the web today and the "Best viewed in IE" web, and that's sad. There's a difference in developer goodwill, and of course things aren't as buggy as they were back then so it overall doesn't feel like you're "stuck" with Chrome like it did with IE, but... you are. You're just OK with it.
I have been repeating the Chrome is the new IE meme for the last few years. I even had a boss that only cared about our code working on Chrome and would lose it when I was demoing / developing from FireFox. I only ever demoed in Chrome just to feed that illusion that I was adhering to Chrome but I honestly dont see anything special or better and I still made sure it behaved and worked the same in both. I know people in my office use other browsers (these were internal tools).
It saddens me that people worship Chrome and yet Firefox has a lot more potential in some areas. Hell it was Mozilla and not Google that gave us WebAssembly through asm.js and other awesome efforts. Microsoft gave us AJAX when Mozilla reverse engineered it back when standards were not properly standardized which is why AJAX is so XML focused in the name despite being able to fetch other things.
There is a difference though: when Firefox was launched, it was still possible to develop a browser from scratch (like Opera was doing back then), and hence lively competition. Nowadays, with WHATWG HTML's feature creep (the HTML "living standard" spec alone weighing in at 1250 pages and 13.3 MB as a PDF, plus tens of CSS specs all over the place, and JavaScript a moving target), that's infeasible for even a nation-state budget.
There's not really much of a difference between the web today and the "Best viewed in IE" web, and that's sad
At least back then sites were not as reliant on JS, so I think that's one of the ways it was better; sure, sites often looked different in non-IE vs. IE, but you could still consume the mostly-static content (and what wasn't static was almost always ads...) Now there are far too many "appifications" of sites that shouldn't be anything but static pages, JS is required to render their content, and that JS is often very browser-specific.
There's a difference between now and the 90s/00s. And its worse now.
At least Microsoft's overarching goal was just to get developers to use their platform, by making their platform as useful as possible (even if many of the changes were ultimately misguided).
With Google, there's some of this, but there's also some very clear "we're an ads company and we want the ad experience on Chrome to favor us as much as possible, without regard for the user."
"There's not really much of a difference between the web today and the "Best viewed in IE" web, and that's sad. There's a difference in developer goodwill, and of course things aren't as buggy as they were back then so it overall doesn't feel like you're "stuck" with Chrome like it did with IE, but... you are. You're just OK with it."
I agree that the monopoly power situation is similar but there really is a big difference between IE hell and today's situation.
There is a big difference between one browser having a cool feature that may not be available in other browsers, versus the leading browser strangling everyone in a stasis of mediocrity, which was the case when IE/Microsoft owned the web.
>There's not really much of a difference between the web today and the "Best viewed in IE" web
This is a shallow comment. IE was closed-source, cornered the market and then abandoned all development. They stalled the web for years.
Today all browser vendors are active in the standardization process, open or nearly open source, and collaborate heavily to implement the same features.
Any feature that "only works in X browser" is a result of one browser implementing a feature first, rather than the result of a browser monopoly. For instance prefers-color-scheme was introduced by Safari, than Firefox, and next to-be Chrome.
So yes, for a period of one to two months a site might have "worked best in Safari" as a result of this feature adoption. But drawing a parallel to a web dominated by IE6 is completely ignoring all context of the situation. It shows a complete misunderstanding of how the web has evolved.
If I don't like something, I'm going to talk about it. The plusses, and the minuses. You can't have everything in life and that is the way I veiw everything (although that has little to do with these odd new html tags).
Unlike the author, I do not think <toast> is a good idea. Elements are supposed to express semantics, but this just suggests behaviour. Not very descriptive behaviour either - since when does actual real-life toast smoothly rise and fall again? Possibly from the ceiling or coming in from the side?
Why not just call it <notification>?
Or even better, don’t add anything - it’s surely just a <div> that needs styling and animating with existing CSS and JS?
But it's called a toast because that's what many UX people have called it for years, because it pops up and toast pops up. It's a specific kind of notification, not any notification. (There's also "butter bar" and "modal dialog" and so on.)
And yes it's behavior, but <input> and <button> and <select> and <textarea> define plenty of behavior too.
I think the big concern here is standards and process... not its name or concept in themselves.
I've read the explainer but I still don't think I understand what this toast element is supposed to do. Also, am I correct in understanding that it is pretty much useless without javascript?
Unlike modern toasters which rudely attempt to catapult your toast into orbit, the Sunbeam gracefully and almost silently presents your toast with the love and care it deserves.
what?? I thought he was just snarkily referring to some proposal/tag that he didn't want to actually name, likely <portal>. <toast> is a dreadful name.
Doesn't anyone there remember when <bold> and <italic> got deprecated in favor of <strong> and <em>??
Note, this is a sarcastic opening to a serious proposal — that Google not dump elements into the WHATWG HTML spec without user discussion and use cases:
The way Google has gone about this seems to be…
1. Ooh! I have a cool idea!
2. Other people in Google agree with me!
3. Other Google projects could benefit from this?
4. Let's stick it in Chrome!
5. Oh, guess we should tell the community what we're doing.
He thinks maybe <toast> is fine (pattern of a notification container showing up and disappearing again makes sense), but concerned how it’s been introduced.
I don't see how toast is different from the countless proposals for new declarative UI HTML elements that have been submitted over the years, and ignored or withdrawn (such as menu/menuitem), other than it coming from Google (and maybe Google not wanting to expose that functionality via a JavaScript API?) The reasoning against new UI elements has always been the same - they're inessential when JavaScript is needed anyway. I think this incident should make it very clear to everyone that HTML as seen by "browser vendors" (Google) is a very different thing from HTML the markup language as used all over the world for personal, business, medical, legal, and cultural documents, and which demands community representation and participation.
>"He thinks maybe <toast> is fine (pattern of a notification container showing up and disappearing again makes sense), but concerned how it’s been introduced."
They really should have resurrected the blink tag and added a property for the number of iterations required.
...I do not need more new age HTML tags. If <toast> doesn't by default make a toast, it's useless. If I need to style it, I'll just make a <div> or <span> and do my thing.
That's fine if you're just worried about visual representation. But when you want to provide semantic meaning—for the visually impaired, search engine bots, and other non-traditional users—you want to convey more meaning than a div or span alone.
Of course, there are other ways (such as ARIA attributes) to accomplish this.
>Web developers: Positive (previously expressed privately; we've encouraged them to make their interest public on the WICG thread)
So basically, nobody at Google talked to anyone about this, asked only google engineers and then pushed those mentioned google engineers to make postive comments in the standards thread? And none of the other browser know shit about it?
Someone who knows more and is more involved with all of this stuff should consider creating a site that documents all of these times Chrome has either actively broken standards (versus just "not being up to date", which every browser is guilty of and more alright) or actively pushed new standards seeking to strongarm other browsers into support. It would be very valuable to have a clear list as evidence.
"You seem to be having some trouble. The text over here is clickable, but the text right next to it, which looks basically the same isn't. Simple, right? I love 'buttons'!"
"You seem to be having some trouble. I find clicking on everything randomly until you figure out what each piece of the web-page does works best for me!"
"You seem to be having some trouble - have you tried using this website on a phone?"
It looks like you're having some trouble understanding the purposes of our many different circular icons with squiggly things inside them, would you like some help?
Chrome is garbage UI-wise, is not faster than Firefox or Safari as far as I can tell, and everything I use works fine in both those browsers. I do plan to have the Chromium version of Edge installed for the odd site that might be buggy without Chrome and I think that should be good enough.
It gets shipped in Chrome (often without a W3C spec or substantial discussion with other stakeholders), and then other browser vendors are forced to play catch up.
So, uh... fun web history time... this actually kinda existed.
When Internet Explorer 4 or 5 was released, Microsoft was in full-on Embrace and Extend mode, on their way to Extinguish. One of the ways they tried to appeal to businesses (and one of the ways IE4/5-ish ended up being installed well past its best-by date in certain places) was a technology they called ActiveX, basically a brushed up and simplified COM. (The "X" here was from DirectX, which they were trying to market all together; IIRC technically the Agent had nothing to do with DirectX.)
And one of the ActiveX objects they released for this functionality was, basically, Clippy. It was called the Microsoft Agent [1]. It included a number of characters, but you could bring up the real, actual-factual Clippy in Internet Explorer. You could also use text-to-speech to actually speak to the user. It had an API that allowed you to trigger certain pre-cooked animations, move it around the page, etc.
In an advanced mode, you could also specify your own graphics files. It also allowed you to specify graphics for something like 5 different mouth shapes, so you could reasonably lip-sync your new wizard object. I did this to my University's logo back in the day.
I say it "kinda" existed because, technically, this wasn't its own tag. It was an instance of the OBJECT tag [2]. But there was a time where at least in Internet Explorer there literally was HTML you could write that would put the literal Clippy on your web page.
[2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/lwef/access... - "[Microsoft Agent is deprecated as of Windows 7, and may be unavailable in subsequent versions of Windows.]" "To keep Agent running between pages (and thereby keep a character visible), create another client that remains loaded between page changes. For example, you can create an HTML frameset and declare an tag for Agent in the parent frame." Remember frames?
"a technology they called ActiveX, basically a brushed up and simplified COM. (The "X" here was from DirectX, which they were trying to market all together; IIRC technically the Agent had nothing to do with DirectX.)"
This reminds me, one of the small enduring legacies of the 90s X-TREME! craze is that Microsoft still does a lot of marketing around the letter X, even today, like the XBox. And that goes back to ActiveX and DirectX being named in an era where that was intended to make Microsoft sound Hip and Cool and With It. I suppose at this point the XBox has transcended this, and is now just a name.
> I never encountered the Microsoft Agent in the wild.
Then you missed out on the silly games I wrote for it, or the way I got around having to speak my own class presentations by having PowerPoint narrate itself. (I wish I had more videos of that stuff that I did in school given that deprecation has bit rotted it all.)
Also, you never got accidentally talked into installing ~malware~ "friendly user assistance and downloader tools" like Bonzi Buddy.
It’s crap like this why I abandoned front end dev. I’ve not heard of <toast> before and as other commenters mention, the semantics are terrible. Binding externally OS/platform specific behavior to an agnostic browser tagset is an abomination.
I'm about as big a Firefox fanboy as they come, but... I don't understand the problem here?
The Chrome devs are thinking about whether a <toast> element would be useful. They float the proposal early on, and announce that they will implement (not ship! Web developers cannot use it) it to get some real-world experience with that to inform its design.
Still plenty of time for people to get involved, make objections, allow refinement, etc. Or am I missing something?
[+] [-] moreira|6 years ago|reply
But their view of the situation is completely correct; just because this one feature might be useful (heck, when Microsoft dumped XMLHttpRequest on us that was incredible too), doesn't change the fact that we're now living in a web where Google does whatever it wants, adds whatever it wants to Chrome, and the web is at its mercy. If they wanted to add <blink> it'd get added and supported, and other browsers would have to follow lest they become incompatible.
There's not really much of a difference between the web today and the "Best viewed in IE" web, and that's sad. There's a difference in developer goodwill, and of course things aren't as buggy as they were back then so it overall doesn't feel like you're "stuck" with Chrome like it did with IE, but... you are. You're just OK with it.
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|6 years ago|reply
It saddens me that people worship Chrome and yet Firefox has a lot more potential in some areas. Hell it was Mozilla and not Google that gave us WebAssembly through asm.js and other awesome efforts. Microsoft gave us AJAX when Mozilla reverse engineered it back when standards were not properly standardized which is why AJAX is so XML focused in the name despite being able to fetch other things.
[+] [-] tannhaeuser|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|6 years ago|reply
At least back then sites were not as reliant on JS, so I think that's one of the ways it was better; sure, sites often looked different in non-IE vs. IE, but you could still consume the mostly-static content (and what wasn't static was almost always ads...) Now there are far too many "appifications" of sites that shouldn't be anything but static pages, JS is required to render their content, and that JS is often very browser-specific.
[+] [-] 013a|6 years ago|reply
At least Microsoft's overarching goal was just to get developers to use their platform, by making their platform as useful as possible (even if many of the changes were ultimately misguided).
With Google, there's some of this, but there's also some very clear "we're an ads company and we want the ad experience on Chrome to favor us as much as possible, without regard for the user."
[+] [-] xtf|6 years ago|reply
Or better: Use standards which match most browsers at caniuse.com
[+] [-] Edmond|6 years ago|reply
I agree that the monopoly power situation is similar but there really is a big difference between IE hell and today's situation.
There is a big difference between one browser having a cool feature that may not be available in other browsers, versus the leading browser strangling everyone in a stasis of mediocrity, which was the case when IE/Microsoft owned the web.
[+] [-] SquareWheel|6 years ago|reply
This is a shallow comment. IE was closed-source, cornered the market and then abandoned all development. They stalled the web for years.
Today all browser vendors are active in the standardization process, open or nearly open source, and collaborate heavily to implement the same features.
Any feature that "only works in X browser" is a result of one browser implementing a feature first, rather than the result of a browser monopoly. For instance prefers-color-scheme was introduced by Safari, than Firefox, and next to-be Chrome.
So yes, for a period of one to two months a site might have "worked best in Safari" as a result of this feature adoption. But drawing a parallel to a web dominated by IE6 is completely ignoring all context of the situation. It shows a complete misunderstanding of how the web has evolved.
[+] [-] kdazzle|6 years ago|reply
I don't know - I kind of figured that was part of the joke - I thought it was pretty clever.
[+] [-] nerd7473|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dhimes|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jl6|6 years ago|reply
Why not just call it <notification>?
Or even better, don’t add anything - it’s surely just a <div> that needs styling and animating with existing CSS and JS?
[+] [-] crazygringo|6 years ago|reply
But it's called a toast because that's what many UX people have called it for years, because it pops up and toast pops up. It's a specific kind of notification, not any notification. (There's also "butter bar" and "modal dialog" and so on.)
And yes it's behavior, but <input> and <button> and <select> and <textarea> define plenty of behavior too.
I think the big concern here is standards and process... not its name or concept in themselves.
[+] [-] mstade|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geezerjay|6 years ago|reply
In Android land, a "toast" is a particular implementation of a notification.
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/notifiers/toas...
[+] [-] teh_klev|6 years ago|reply
Perhaps the inspiration came from the Sunbeam Radiant Control toaster:
https://youtu.be/1OfxlSG6q5Y
Unlike modern toasters which rudely attempt to catapult your toast into orbit, the Sunbeam gracefully and almost silently presents your toast with the love and care it deserves.
[+] [-] bluerobotcat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomasedwards|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eric_WVGG|6 years ago|reply
Doesn't anyone there remember when <bold> and <italic> got deprecated in favor of <strong> and <em>??
[+] [-] dangerface|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Terretta|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tannhaeuser|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inflatableDodo|6 years ago|reply
They really should have resurrected the blink tag and added a property for the number of iterations required.
[+] [-] CodinM|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] organsnyder|6 years ago|reply
Of course, there are other ways (such as ARIA attributes) to accomplish this.
[+] [-] delta1|6 years ago|reply
"Intent to Implement: Toast UI element"
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!msg/blink...
[+] [-] zaarn|6 years ago|reply
>Edge: No public signals
>Safari: No public signals
>Web developers: Positive (previously expressed privately; we've encouraged them to make their interest public on the WICG thread)
So basically, nobody at Google talked to anyone about this, asked only google engineers and then pushed those mentioned google engineers to make postive comments in the standards thread? And none of the other browser know shit about it?
What the fuck?
[+] [-] DCoder|6 years ago|reply
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ar1qj1/x/egl52...
[+] [-] 013a|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] synesso|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gruez|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thehodge|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SketchySeaBeast|6 years ago|reply
"You seem to be having some trouble. I find clicking on everything randomly until you figure out what each piece of the web-page does works best for me!"
"You seem to be having some trouble - have you tried using this website on a phone?"
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjoonathan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newaccoutnas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxdxbx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dreamcompiler|6 years ago|reply
This. Apple is in this self-reflecting bubble too. Companies that start off user-focused and get big often become thoroughly narcissistic.
[+] [-] lol768|6 years ago|reply
It gets shipped in Chrome (often without a W3C spec or substantial discussion with other stakeholders), and then other browser vendors are forced to play catch up.
[+] [-] jerf|6 years ago|reply
When Internet Explorer 4 or 5 was released, Microsoft was in full-on Embrace and Extend mode, on their way to Extinguish. One of the ways they tried to appeal to businesses (and one of the ways IE4/5-ish ended up being installed well past its best-by date in certain places) was a technology they called ActiveX, basically a brushed up and simplified COM. (The "X" here was from DirectX, which they were trying to market all together; IIRC technically the Agent had nothing to do with DirectX.)
And one of the ActiveX objects they released for this functionality was, basically, Clippy. It was called the Microsoft Agent [1]. It included a number of characters, but you could bring up the real, actual-factual Clippy in Internet Explorer. You could also use text-to-speech to actually speak to the user. It had an API that allowed you to trigger certain pre-cooked animations, move it around the page, etc.
In an advanced mode, you could also specify your own graphics files. It also allowed you to specify graphics for something like 5 different mouth shapes, so you could reasonably lip-sync your new wizard object. I did this to my University's logo back in the day.
I say it "kinda" existed because, technically, this wasn't its own tag. It was an instance of the OBJECT tag [2]. But there was a time where at least in Internet Explorer there literally was HTML you could write that would put the literal Clippy on your web page.
A gallery of the available characters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb9yBfDLjsI
I didn't find any videos of the Clippy character used in a web page, but it shipped in the default control, I'm fairly sure.
I never encountered the Microsoft Agent in the wild.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoCiSRQGJX4
[2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/lwef/access... - "[Microsoft Agent is deprecated as of Windows 7, and may be unavailable in subsequent versions of Windows.]" "To keep Agent running between pages (and thereby keep a character visible), create another client that remains loaded between page changes. For example, you can create an HTML frameset and declare an tag for Agent in the parent frame." Remember frames?
[+] [-] jerf|6 years ago|reply
This reminds me, one of the small enduring legacies of the 90s X-TREME! craze is that Microsoft still does a lot of marketing around the letter X, even today, like the XBox. And that goes back to ActiveX and DirectX being named in an era where that was intended to make Microsoft sound Hip and Cool and With It. I suppose at this point the XBox has transcended this, and is now just a name.
[+] [-] WorldMaker|6 years ago|reply
Then you missed out on the silly games I wrote for it, or the way I got around having to speak my own class presentations by having PowerPoint narrate itself. (I wish I had more videos of that stuff that I did in school given that deprecation has bit rotted it all.)
Also, you never got accidentally talked into installing ~malware~ "friendly user assistance and downloader tools" like Bonzi Buddy.
[+] [-] edent|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] binarymax|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vinnl|6 years ago|reply
The Chrome devs are thinking about whether a <toast> element would be useful. They float the proposal early on, and announce that they will implement (not ship! Web developers cannot use it) it to get some real-world experience with that to inform its design.
Still plenty of time for people to get involved, make objections, allow refinement, etc. Or am I missing something?
[+] [-] Aeolun|6 years ago|reply
I have a really hard time understanding why anyone would want it.
[+] [-] soverance|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tinfoilhat666|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tln|6 years ago|reply