On 9/5/11 10:49 PM, Paul Libbrecht wrote:
Le 6 sept. 2011 à 00:51, Glenn Maynard a écrit :
On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 11:41 AM, Paul Libbrecht <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Slowly, users start to see the disadvantages of a dirty web-page
(e.g. flash advertisement 100% cpu) and I am confident they will
not that some pages mingle with their copy ability or actually
provide a service to do so.
Sorry, I'm having trouble parsing this.
My experience so far is that people are aggravated by pages that
insert ads into copied text, but not quite enough to stop them from
using a page. They grumble and delete the ad. That's the most
annoying category of abuse, in my opinion: not bad enough to strongly
discourage its use, causing it to spread, but bad enough to
continuously annoy users.
They will provide feedback and/or prefer sites that do not do that.
The offer is diverse enough for this.
That's what the paragraph above says.
I agree that the API indeed brings in new possibilities of abuse and
new utilities, they cannot be discerned except by an end user.
You are are right we need to be aware of the risks.
The tracker injection is, to my taste, relatively mild.
Hidden anchors would be considerably worse.
paul
I'd love to hear your feedback but that's how I feel things and I
think we just have to accept it: new technology, new risks,
positive and negative.
It's acceptable for new technologies to have negatives, of course;
the positives need to balance the negatives.
To be clear, I don't mean that this abuse is newly exposed by this
API. It's an abuse that's been spreading lately, using hacks with
existing APIs. I meant that it shows that people will broadly abuse
anything that lets them fiddle with the clipboard; in other words,
this isn't a theoretical problem.
I'd hoped to see browsers adjust behavior so clipboard copying
happens before anything else (before firing DOM events at all),
making it more difficult for pages to fiddle with the selection
before the copy occurs, but this API makes that approach useless; it
officially blesses the entire category of
messing-with-what-the-user-copies, so it'd never be fixable. That's
frustrating.
I've seen licensing contracts which require clipboard operations to be
obfuscated. I think they are wrong-headed, but the licensing issue
results in sites which need to obfuscate their source code through
IFRAME and other such measures.
Licensees working with such a contract -may- have an argument for
staying away from various obfuscation methods, if they can claim that
view-source, copy/paste and print, are disabled for typical web users.
Media selectors make the disabling of print "easy". An abuse-able,
copy/paste mechanism works for the other issue. View-source is handled
via xml entities / the ampersand in HTML/XML.
The positive side of this, is that authors can provide their content
using best standards: the content can be encoded in normal HTML, it can
be read in all browsers, and the content can be read by assistive
technologies. On the negative side, such sites will be frustrating for
users trying to copy, print or otherwise use content in a fair manner.
-Charles
