The notion that states are the perfect reflection of the democratic will is quite silly.
Suppose a party in Europe is elected on the premise that they will provide free ice cream for all. This is an important issue for people, so they vote for the party. When they get into power, they ban ice cream to promote "healthier living".
Most citizens do not support this policy but they did support the government being elected due to various leveraged mechanisms, such as political polarization, identity politics, laws, outright lies & manipulation, etc.
Ironically, these states keep turning over their leadership because it's incredibly unpopular and the new leadership just continues to do incredibly unpopular things.
>This reluctance extends to different types of platforms. Only around a third would be likely to provide age proof for messaging apps (38%) or social media sites (37%). For user-generated encyclopaedias like Wikipedia, half (51%) say they would be unlikely to submit any proof of age. Just 19% say they would be willing to submit proof of age for dating apps, lowering to 14% for pornography websites.
> But people should also be able to get apps from whatever store they want.
I agree with you. But, as devil's advocate, why not suggest that Apple should be allowed to run as crappy a store as they want, while people should be free not to buy Apple?
People are free to buy Apple (or an Android flavour, or no smartphone at all). But there are many many things which goes into a buying decision than what manner of software delivery is available.
This duopoly does not truly offer a lot of choice, so any criticism must happen from within the confines of the current reality.
I’m not going to tell a pedestrian who wants safer roads to stop being a participant in traffic, I accept that they have very little real choice.
Having to uncritically accept anything and everything the manufacturer of your device does is not really viable and is a recipe for a worse future.
> And what people in western, democratic world think about it?
People are usually asked to 'think about the children'. Pedophiles, drugs, suicides, self-harm, cyberbullying; and whatever other horror stories the media has at hand. This maneuver is usually sufficient to neutralize the opposition.
I need a tooltip, with a pointer; but it seems that the current state of the spec does not allow for pointers; and most explainers studiously avoid this use case, as if this isn't a lion's share of what people do with anchored floating boxes.
Tooltips are normally visible on hover, so the pointer is your cursor. I've never added an additional arrow pointing to the element, nor had any designers ask me to do so. So I'd disagree that such a design is the "lion's share", but am curious what types of apps you create where you do find it to be so?
Someone in a comment below posted a link to Adobe Spectrum design system [0]. You will find similarly shaped tooltips in Shoelace [1], or shadcn [2]. The Popper library has it [3]. Github's design system has it (they call it popover) [4]. It's an extremely common design pattern.
They are using a stylized floating DIV (or something) not the built-in thing from the title attribute. Lots of design teams seem to want this, for consistency.
> Think a common approach is to just display a triangular svg beneath the tooltip
One killer feature of CSS anchor positioning is that it allows you to declaratively define fallback positions if the floating element does not fit into the preferred position. For example, you prefer your tooltips to appear below the anchor; but if the anchor happens to be at the bottom of the screen, there is no space below it, and so the floating element can flip to the top.
After the flip, the triangular svg will be pointing in the wrong direction.
I'm unsure what you mean by "pointer" - normally that just refers to the user's mouse cursor on-screen...
...do you mean you want a rich-HTML tooltip that is auto-positioned to ensure it's fully visible w.r.t. the browser's viewport but you also want the tooltip (or UI in general) to include an arrow shape that stays fixed on-target even if might be occluded by the browser?
> Rationalists came to correct views about the COVID-19 pandemic while many others were saying masks didn’t work
I wonder what views about covid-19 are correct. On masks, I remember the mainstream messaging went through the stages that were masks don't work, some masks work, all masks work, double masking works, to finally masks don't work (or some masks work; I can't remember where we ended up).
> to finally masks don't work (or some masks work; I can't remember where we ended up).
Most masks 'work', for some value of 'work', but efficacy differs (which, to be clear, was ~always known; there was a very short period when some authorities insisted that covid was primarily transmitted by touch, but you're talking weeks at most). In particular I think what confused people was that the standard blue surgical masks are somewhat effective at stopping an infected person from passing on covid (and various other things), but not hugely effective at preventing the wearer from contracting covid; for that you want something along the lines of an n95 respirator.
The main actual point of controversy was whether it was airborne or not (vs just short-range spread by droplets); the answer, in the end, was 'yes', but it took longer than it should have to get there.
> In particular I think what confused people was that the standard blue surgical masks are somewhat effective at stopping an infected person from passing on covid (and various other things), but not hugely effective at preventing the wearer from contracting covid
Yes, exactly.
If we look at guidelines about influenza, we will see them say that "surgical masks are not considered adequate respiratory protection for airborne transmission of pandemic influenza". And as far as I understand, it was finally agreed that in terms of transmission, Sars CoV-2 behaves similarly to the influenza virus.
Basic masks work for society because they stop your saliva from traveling but they don't work for you because they don't stop particles from other people saliva from reaching you
Putting just about anything in front of your face will help prevent spreading illness to some extent, this is why we teach children to "vampire cough". Masks were always effective to some degree. The CDC lied to the public by initially telling them not to use masks because they wanted to keep the supply for healthcare workers and they were afraid that the pubic would buy them all up first. It was a very very stupid thing to do and it undermined people's trust in the CDC and confused people about masks. After that masks became politicized and the whole topic became a minefield.
- Creating a language (typescript) that took the front-end web community by storm.
- Becoming one of the real adopters of "progressive web apps". Apple is actively hostile to them, because they would eat into the 30% cut they are making from the apps distributed via the app store; Google, once a champion, has grown kinda tepid, because it also gets a cut from apps distributed via Google Play; but Microsoft now behave as if they are a believer.
- Shipping a tremendously popular text editor, Visual Studio Code.
> - Shipping a tremendously popular text editor, Visual Studio Code.
Which feels sluggish compared to how it used to be. They keep tacking on too much cruft to it. I used to call it a lightweight IDE, but now its just a bloated editor.
Sorry, but even with typescript, the frontend web community a shit-storm.
Anything Microsoft + web is a nightmare. Their login system is a redirect and re-auth hell and I loath anytime I need to log into anything Microsoft related.
> I totally disagree with his conclusion that companies want their website to be faster
But what do web developers want? What do web designers want? Some developers pride themselved on being craftsmen. They would write tests. They would design architectures. Why wouldn't they want websites they are building to be faster?
Management doesn't care about it being crafted nicely. They want a ROI. Often it isn't easy for them to see the benefit of something being more performant, or looking better. It doesn't matter to them as often they won't ever use these systems. It just needs to function acceptably.
A huge number of places are not data-driven. Therefore it is difficult to show in anyway that improving service speed will improve ROI.
So even if you are a craftsmen, your colleagues aren't. They will never care, they have no incentive to, because management doesn't care.
I've totally given up with it and I can write fast JS code. I just don't get rewarded for it. In fact it has be a detriment to my career.
Management are management. They do managementy things. They do not develop. We, developers, do. For some things, we hold ourselves up to certain standards. Why not for site performance?
> I've totally given up with it and I've can write fast JS code. I just don't get rewarded for it. In fact it has be a detriment to my career.
Do you write tests? They also are something that doesn't directly bring money.
> Management are management. They do managementy things. They do not develop. We, developers, do. For some things, we hold ourselves up to certain standards. Why not for site performance?
I've just explained why. What part didn't you understand?
> Do you write tests? They also are something that doesn't directly bring money
I do (I like to know my code works). That doesn't mean other people will.
Much like site performance unless there is an emphasis on quality, then many developers won't bother writing tests.
I've had people copy and paste tests, then jig the code around so they got the green tick in the IDE. The feature didn't work at all. The test was complete nonsense. I have colleagues that put up PRs where the code doesn't even compile.
As a web developer who also uses web sites I care less about speed than I do usability. Most of the time I'm on a 1Gbps+ connection, all I want is your site flows to make sense and any actions I take to be reliable and clearly handle errors. For things that are truly critical I want 99% of my UI to be precached by a native application, so we're only talking in data (and yes, keep that data small).
There are lots of good reasons to make your website faster, but given the number of sites I've seen that fall over and die if you block Google Analytics, I don't feel that it's the biggest issue most websites have.
> As a web developer who also uses web sites I care less about speed than I do usability. Most of the time I'm on a 1Gbps+ connection
Sure, I get it. The same argument can be applied to web accessibility. Most frontend developers are young and healthy. Should they care about accessibility of the sites they build?
It’s not the same argument at all. Accessibility is important. What I’m saying is if you want it to be fast offload the UI to a native app, don’t even bother me with a web page. If it’s critical serve it in plain text or simple HTML. Either of those are both fast and accessible.
The idea that most websites should broadly work for people even on a 2G signal is absurd. Some should. However I’m not going to try to configure a BMW and email dealers from the middle of the woods, and I’m sure they know their target audience is not either.
> It’s not the same argument at all. Accessibility is important. What I’m saying is if you want it to be fast offload the UI to a native app, don’t even bother me with a web page. If it’s critical serve it in plain text or simple HTML. Either of those are both fast and accessible.
A web page and a native app all suffer from the same issue. It frequently needs to talk to a server somewhere. No you are downloading the UI/Logic, but often it needs to talk to a server.
> The idea that most websites should broadly work for people even on a 2G signal is absurd.
I worked in a large company and we did optimise for some random guy that was in Spain on a crappy 2G/3G signal (this was a real customer). It was a good test case of how the app responded with a poor bandwidth & signal. As a result the application would behave well when having poor signal.
Large companies such as google pore huge resources into optimising, that why YouTube (both their app and their mobile site) will work on a flakey connection on a train going through the countryside and something like kick.com won't.
Often It isn't the bandwidth that is frequently the issue. It is the latency between requests and stability of a signal. Sometimes a request can fail, the phone goes to sleep and sometimes that can suspend the browser thread. This affects higher bandwidth connections such as 4G and 5G.
If the web site/web app or even native app is coded poorly often you will get into a state where you have to reload the app.
Also downloading an app could be relatively large compared to a web page. If you just want to check the train times / bus times / closing time of a shop or similar it will take longer to use the app as you need to download the whole thing first.
> However I’m not going to try to configure a BMW and email dealers from the middle of the woods, and I’m sure they know their target audience is not either.
Things like this do happen. I've bought vehicles from farmhouses in the middle of nowhere in the UK. Bank transfers, road tax I have literally done in someone's garden.
> Are you going to pay extra those two engineers of your company for doing something that is clearly outside what they were hired for at beginning or outside their competences?
Why is it outside (and not just outside, but clearly outside) of what they were hired for or what their competencies are? Engineers work on the product. Engineers review each other's code. Engineers are a stakeholder in this whole process — after all, the candidate may become their future colleague, and engineers are best positioned to know what they want to see in a prospective colleague. Engineers can appreciate whether their peers have the desired skills.
Why does this activity require a higher pay than developing a new feature with your teammates?
Who is electing the leaders of those states if the things they do are incredibly unpopular?