[whatwg] Suggestion for Menus in Web Forms 2.0

[Jim Ley]

On Sat, 28 Aug 2004 16:33:55 +0000 (UTC), Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> Hitting enter would cause the page to just load normally in the browser.
> It would be stupid for the default to be "trust this site".

These sort of "do you want to..." giving the user a choice of
something they probably don't understand is very problematical.  They
want to access the site, they'll probably just say yes  - just like so
many people say yes and open "viruses" on email today.

I think this is a very difficult thing, and I don't currently believe
any mandated wording or description from the WHAT-WG is appropriate. 
Neither do I necessarily believe anything is appropriate, I'm not sure
of a solution, but I certainly believe IE's HTA is a preferred
solution (it treats the web-browser version exactly as if the user was
downloading an executable - they still run into the how do the users
know to trust problems, but I think it's better to simply a browser
menu.)  I don't really know though, I'm just concerned by the above
proposal for many of the reasons given in the thread already.

> You're assuming that we give the pages a way to tell if they are running
> in a Web browser or "as a native application". It could definitely see
> strong arguments for not making it possible to distinguish the two.

how exactly do you propose to do that, there's going to be all sorts
of ways of inferring that they are (checking computed CSS properties,
try/catching script that would only be permissiong in the native
application etc.)   If you could genuinely prevent them from knowing,
I think you'd have to seriously hobble CSS Object Model etc.

Jim.