browser should not even let the page see this action
> Don't roll your own link navigation.
browser should not even let the page see this action
> Don't roll your own text selection.
browser should not even let the page see this action
> Don't roll your own copy and paste.
browser should not even let the page see this action
I'm serious. WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user? We already loaded the page and rendered it - we users must already be free to do with the content as we please
It depends. A lot of websites refuse to display some stuff without JavaScript, and of course online payments insist on JavaScript (to the point that trying to push through without it can result in strange errors and potential double-charges as you troubleshoot).
> WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user?
Because the alternative is UI/UX Designers and Visionary Managers insisting on keeping Flash and Java Applets and Microsoft Visual Silverlight .Net++ around forever, because you can't do some things in the browser and We Need To Do Them.
Some things have minimal complexity that either lives in the language itself or in libraries. The Web has minimal bells and whistles that are either implemented in the browsers itself or in plugins.
Also: Javascript should not be able to touch the browser history. I know it's useful for some apps. But it's too prone to abuse and that API should be revoked.
I'd like to add "don't roll your own image viewer"
twitter and google and google maps and so many have rolled their own and they completely suck compared to just letting the browser render an img tag. They inevitably fail on some bad multitouch interaction that affects the web page, and the image viewer container. Or they add some slow-as-molasses zooming effect.
Seriously. Don't. You want a single-select box? Use a combo box or radio button group. Want an edit box? Use an edit box. Want a list that finds things as you type? That's in the standard too. Don't roll your own.
This "roll our own controls for everything" bothers me to no end as a screen reader user, because practically nobody properly follows ARIA best practices, and that leads to a less accessible internet.
I agree with a caveat: Default date pickers on mobile devices are very good. But on desktop browsers they are terrible. They break design continuity in a very ugly way and have quirks between browsers and systems. And personally, the popup calendar they provide just too small. If the system took over the date picker on desktop like it does on mobile devices instead of forcing the browser to handle it, I feel like we could get somewhere better.
I just went and confirmed this because it’s not something I’ve really looked at and I agree. The date picker you get from a straight up <input type=“date”> on iOS webkit is pretty nice.
The one in webkit on macOS isn’t quite as good, but is better than the one in firefox if only because firefox closes the picker when you type a year in to move far through time. Good thing firefox is open source.
Yes, but having worked on the date picker at Airbnb I can assure you almost every custom implementation (probably ours too!) messes up date picking in some region in an important way
In the age of AI and npm supply chain attacks I feel like there are more reasons than ever to roll your own.
One other possible title of this article could just be, don’t break UI conventions. Which is not the same thing.
Instead of trying to download and configure a date time thing (for something app specific like domain specific date ranges) rather than having to rely on the configuration of a larger library, then having to manage all future major version upgrades (and some of these npm libraries have major versions every year!) why not just create your own smaller surface area component? It’ll be literally zero maintenance compared to managing an npm dependency in your app.
Counterpoint: all of these things are built right into the user's browser, and browser vendors independently work to avoid attacks across the userbase without any intervention from web designers. In fact, if the browser itself is compromised, we probably have bigger problems anyway. By just letting the browser handle these tools, we do not need to spend any resources at all.
Totally agree. What do engineers or designers think they're trying to accomplish when they mess with the scroll bar? Or the password field? "We are so sophisticated, the built in behavior is simply not good enough for us!"
Congratulations, now your website is a shitty experience for your users. Well done.
In my experience, it's never the engineers nor the designers who makes those decisions. Stuff like that always comes from higher up the ladder, some middle management figure who thinks he is smarter than he is, mandates such abominations and refuses to hear reason from the engineers and the designers.
The engineers and designers then proceed to do as they're told because they like that nice fat paycheck at the end of the month more than they like the service they're building. Which is fair enough.
> Among software developers, and especially among those who work on security-sensitive systems, there is a well-known maxim: Don't roll your own crypto. This does not mean that nobody is allowed to write cryptographic code. Someone has to. It means that, for ordinary production software that protects sensitive data of users, we should not rely on a private, unreviewed implementation that has not been vetted by the wider software development community. We should use established, vetted software packages or tools wherever possible.
The great things about all these crypto libraries are:
- Minimal to no dependencies
- Coded by security conscious people
- Often externally audited
I wish more libs/deps are crafted like them. Until then the risk of rolling your own vs using a dep isn’t as different as it could be.
If you don’t “roll your own,” you must choose from what other people have created. And in this space, there are a bewildering array of options, each of which carries some new pile of abstractions that make some things easy and other things hard.
Many eyes are supposed to make bugs shallow. In the webdev space, many eyes on something like React lead to numerous opinionated alternatives, each successful enough to warrant consideration. This doesn’t seem to be slowing down, either.
Meanwhile, vanilla HTML and DOM capabilities have never been stronger.
all providers only document their bloat-spyware-buggy javascript that creates a button and handles all in the client.
then using libraries you are open to attacks in one hundred ways because those implement all the unrealistic things in the spec (including overriding issuer and setting crypto to nothing, via attacker controlled fields). after two days of evaluating i just gave up and wrote my own, server side and handling the singular case everyone uses. 20 lines, which was less then adopting the libraries.
UX standardizes as majorities begin to agree on patterns/interactions/concepts.
Unfortunately, it’s 1) difficult to reach consensus 2) difficult to broadcast and 3) difficult to enforce. For example, even when major browsers achieve 1) and (e.g. implement a standard component) 2) and 3) are still huge gaps.
If one really wanted to ruffle feathers they could make a script that checks out the latest source code for OpenSSL, OpenSSH maybe a few other communication daemons, makes just a few very subtle changes to a few ciphers, shim in some random nonsensical padding, static compile or containerize and distribute to a private network of systems in minecraft.
Whatever you do don't teach AI how to do this or there could be a flood of VPN's speaking new but not really new ciphers that code breaking farms won't know what to do with and ciphers that are not known to exist and yet nobody ever really rolled their own.
This concept was conceived whilst interacting with Rubix cube players.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say there is never a valid reason to mess with page scrolling. It's just bad design and a terrible experience for the user.
What an odd idea. You should always write your own code whenever possible, that's how we get better things. It's not my job to make the standard better or to force a bad standard, it's your job to make the standard the obviously correct choice.
> Don't roll your own page scrolling, link navigation, text selection, context menu, copy and paste, password field, or date picker.
Javascript in the browser was a mistake. And if we had to have it, the suitable scope of it was what we had around 2004.
Google invested tens of billions in it realizing they had a way of owning the browser space simply by making it insanely complex. Just hire all of the web standards people, tell them to go crazy and then also hire thousands of C++ browser developers for decades to implement everything. Boom, a moat!
I understand the frustration but don’t take it too far. People often post great games here, cool visualisations, useful utilities. Hardly any of those would work at all without JavaScript.
You can do terrible things with JS but you can do great things too.
For those not trying to implement the dark patterns that enshittify the web.
If you don't roll your own back button behavior, you've missed the opportunity to show a few more ads.
If you don't make your window full screen on my shitty old tablet browser (yes, I'm looking at you, BBC), then it's far too easy for me to close your window. (Joke's on you, though -- my old Samsung tablet has a physical back button.)
browser should not even let the page see this action
> Don't roll your own link navigation.
browser should not even let the page see this action
> Don't roll your own text selection.
browser should not even let the page see this action
> Don't roll your own copy and paste.
browser should not even let the page see this action
I'm serious. WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user? We already loaded the page and rendered it - we users must already be free to do with the content as we please
https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/
Because the alternative is UI/UX Designers and Visionary Managers insisting on keeping Flash and Java Applets and Microsoft Visual Silverlight .Net++ around forever, because you can't do some things in the browser and We Need To Do Them.
Some things have minimal complexity that either lives in the language itself or in libraries. The Web has minimal bells and whistles that are either implemented in the browsers itself or in plugins.
twitter and google and google maps and so many have rolled their own and they completely suck compared to just letting the browser render an img tag. They inevitably fail on some bad multitouch interaction that affects the web page, and the image viewer container. Or they add some slow-as-molasses zooming effect.
* Don't roll your own standard controls
Seriously. Don't. You want a single-select box? Use a combo box or radio button group. Want an edit box? Use an edit box. Want a list that finds things as you type? That's in the standard too. Don't roll your own.
This "roll our own controls for everything" bothers me to no end as a screen reader user, because practically nobody properly follows ARIA best practices, and that leads to a less accessible internet.
The one in webkit on macOS isn’t quite as good, but is better than the one in firefox if only because firefox closes the picker when you type a year in to move far through time. Good thing firefox is open source.
You mean your browser's. There is no "the browser".
I have a personal issue with having a 500KB page load, so a button press can be animated.
One other possible title of this article could just be, don’t break UI conventions. Which is not the same thing.
Instead of trying to download and configure a date time thing (for something app specific like domain specific date ranges) rather than having to rely on the configuration of a larger library, then having to manage all future major version upgrades (and some of these npm libraries have major versions every year!) why not just create your own smaller surface area component? It’ll be literally zero maintenance compared to managing an npm dependency in your app.
Congratulations, now your website is a shitty experience for your users. Well done.
The engineers and designers then proceed to do as they're told because they like that nice fat paycheck at the end of the month more than they like the service they're building. Which is fair enough.
The great things about all these crypto libraries are:
- Minimal to no dependencies
- Coded by security conscious people
- Often externally audited
I wish more libs/deps are crafted like them. Until then the risk of rolling your own vs using a dep isn’t as different as it could be.
Many eyes are supposed to make bugs shallow. In the webdev space, many eyes on something like React lead to numerous opinionated alternatives, each successful enough to warrant consideration. This doesn’t seem to be slowing down, either.
Meanwhile, vanilla HTML and DOM capabilities have never been stronger.
all providers only document their bloat-spyware-buggy javascript that creates a button and handles all in the client.
then using libraries you are open to attacks in one hundred ways because those implement all the unrealistic things in the spec (including overriding issuer and setting crypto to nothing, via attacker controlled fields). after two days of evaluating i just gave up and wrote my own, server side and handling the singular case everyone uses. 20 lines, which was less then adopting the libraries.
Unfortunately, it’s 1) difficult to reach consensus 2) difficult to broadcast and 3) difficult to enforce. For example, even when major browsers achieve 1) and (e.g. implement a standard component) 2) and 3) are still huge gaps.
agreed, that page decided they needed to write their own scrolling logic and it made the page horrible.
Whatever you do don't teach AI how to do this or there could be a flood of VPN's speaking new but not really new ciphers that code breaking farms won't know what to do with and ciphers that are not known to exist and yet nobody ever really rolled their own.
This concept was conceived whilst interacting with Rubix cube players.
Javascript in the browser was a mistake. And if we had to have it, the suitable scope of it was what we had around 2004.
Google invested tens of billions in it realizing they had a way of owning the browser space simply by making it insanely complex. Just hire all of the web standards people, tell them to go crazy and then also hire thousands of C++ browser developers for decades to implement everything. Boom, a moat!
You can do terrible things with JS but you can do great things too.
For those not trying to implement the dark patterns that enshittify the web.
If you don't roll your own back button behavior, you've missed the opportunity to show a few more ads.
If you don't make your window full screen on my shitty old tablet browser (yes, I'm looking at you, BBC), then it's far too easy for me to close your window. (Joke's on you, though -- my old Samsung tablet has a physical back button.)