[whatwg] Suggestion for Menus in Web Forms 2.0

[Ian Hickson]

On Sat, 28 Aug 2004, Jim Ley wrote:
> 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.

Yeah, I'm not sure what a good solution is either.


> > 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.

I can't see that the stylesheets would be any different, and I don't see 
why the permissions would be different either. The only real difference is 
whether the browser's own chrome is around the window or not.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'