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by orblivion 1375 days ago
Some people here are complaining that this is a hack, technical debt, etc. I thought the point would be the political one, as it were. YouTube.com gets special treatment in a major web browser, whereas Sal's discount video website has to conform to standards like all the other plebs.

It's an erosion (however minor, by itself) of the idea of an open standard.

3 comments

Apple has a list of websites with quirks that don’t support its “generate strong passwords” feature even though there is HTML spec where you can specify the types of passwords you support.

https://github.com/apple/password-manager-resources

Many of these sites are quite obscure.

https://github.com/apple/password-manager-resources/blob/mai...

For being "quite obscure", I've at least heard of most of these sites before. Banks with "maxlength: 8", you love to see it.

QQ: why do they embed the rules in a string and not just regular json?
I just actually looked at the JSON, I just assumed the rule was going to be defined as regex, not a human readable pattern.
I just love that apple.com itself is included there.
Apple also has a list of websites it autocompletes

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30903246

I’d rather have the companies fighting for the user. What is the purpose of a standard anyway, other than to serve the users? The idea is counterproductive if it results in a worse UX, even if just in the medium term.

In this case, getting those companies to fix their broken code is unrealistic. Less realistic than just providing a whitelist anyway.

You think Google is doing this because they "fight for the user"?! Maybe in the same way cattle ranchers "fight for the livestock" by plumbing wells and seeding grasslands. BTW, almost anything can be justified with this logic: "We propose a convoluted device level tracking scheme that locks down all advert/databroker revenue... a tech moat so wide that, coincidentally, we are the only potential beneficiaries... because we fight for the user!"
I just appreciate that the end result is a better UX. How we got there, I don't care. The standards are important, but they're ultimately there to provide a nice UX and that's it.
> How we got there, I don't care.

Well that is a good way of ensuring that the same class of problems will endlessly reappear, while also providing a broken utilitarian end-justifies-the-means rationale that is certain to be abused.

> The standards are important, but they're ultimately there to provide a nice UX and that's it.

No, standards are there to make interoperability possible, which overcomes the hazards of market network effect, leveling the field for more competing solutions, thus yielding a better <insert literally anything in the whole world, including UX>.

If this goes against your philosophy, you can actually disable this:

Develop Menu > Disable Site-specific Hacks

That doesn't solve the GP's complaint. Defaults are powerful.
However, moving YT videos (and ads!) from embeds or old Flash-code to isolated iframes may be a sane default.