On Fri, 01 Feb 2013 11:48:33 +0100, Hallvord Reiar Michaelsen Steen
<[email protected]> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 2:18 PM, Florian Bösch <[email protected]> wrote:
> I would propose to centralize this and make it an up-front dialog >
remembered for a site such that:
(Your proposal is broadly in line with the common thinking of browser
makers today, but...)
That kind of bulk approach does not work. Users don't understand
what's going on.
That's what research shows. To be fair, we've generally presented the
options in ways that are over-technical.
"This application will have access to your location" is not as clear as
"This page can tell anyone where you are and where you go while it is open"
...
"If you enter a credit card number in this page, anyone can 'listen in'
and copy it" compared to "the certificate is issued by an unrecognised
authority"...
etc
Browsers have got a lot better at this over the last few years, and it is
probably time to do some more research.
To what extent are we sure users understand a prompt about for example
web storage?
That is the question. As Anne says, the research generally concludes
"we're pretty sure most of them didn't even read the message".
(This has been discussed in the past too, I suggest
you read the archives of this list, public-web-notifications maybe,
and probably public-device-apis.)
It certainly has been discussed but not really resolved - also, UI
paradigms and usability research evolve, so I guess it's natural to
revisit this discussion now and then.
Yes.
It does of course lie somewhat outside of the scope of most W3C work,
given that it is about a specific aspect of browser UI,
Yep. There was some security work done a few years ago specifically
looking at the sort of things that users understood, which recommended
that for security it is helpful to have consistent presentation across
browser UI.
While it is useful to do the research, and share results, especially where
we can show that consistency is important, how to implement this is
basically a user agent implementation question. And it has evolved over
time.
which might be one of the reasons why it's so hard to find good
solutions.
Maybe, but I think the main reason is that it is a very hard problem. (One
secondary reason is that browser vendors generally "don't pay enough
attention" to really thinking hard about user experience and usability as
an evidence-based and evolving field, where it is almost impossible to do
"too much work" - but very possible to overrun any budget you can come up
with).
cheers
Chaals
--
Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
[email protected] Find more at http://yandex.com
