>Plotnick is [...] the leading expert on buttons and how people interact with them.
Something must be wrong with me. This sentence would sound so lame to the average person and yet it sounds fascinating to me. I wish I had the title of "the leading expert on buttons."
I really LOVE how the WHOLE article is about BUTTONS BUTTONS BUTTONS. It really clears any doubt about her expertise. It's not an exaggeration. It's an actual leading expert on buttons!
>The blind community had to fight for years to make touchscreens more accessible. It’s always been funny to me that we call them touchscreens. We think about them as a touch modality, but a touchscreen prioritizes the visual.
Really interesting observation. In order to press virtual buttons, you have to look at the screen to figure out whether the button is (unless it's a full-width button at the bottom). Physical buttons generally don't require this in order to be pushed. They may still require this if the action the button performs depends on a state that is indicated by a screen, e.g. a menu where you have directional buttons to change the selected item.
Why would Youtube, which makes money off ads, allow a web browser that blocks ads to access Youtube when they could just refuse to serve their user agent?
If a major website starting blocking user agents for any reason other than compatibility then all that would do is trigger (finally) the deprecation of user agents strings as browsers would all just pretend to be each other.
It would just be yet another zero-sum meta-war, with web browsers ultimately using randomized user agent strings just as mobiles randomize MAC addresses.
But none of that means that the war somehow can't or won't occur.
User agents are trivially fungible thing in this. That's the nature of the internet and how connections are established. Personal hardware constructs whatever packet that is going out and there's nothing special if that packet comes from a sanctioned or unsanctioned client. There's no way for a provider to distinguish the difference between what created an acceptable packet.
It's difficult for me to envision how that's rigorously enforceable to prevent something outside of the app (like a browser) to access something ultimately consumed by an API without resorting to (expensive and crackable) digital rights management at the hardware level. You can run down whatever train of thought you want, but ultimately since the client is running on machines controlled by the consumer, it can be cracked, reverse engineered, decapped, or whatever. This has been the end state for every attempt the industry has made to control user behavior. DVD CSS, Bluray, Sony's CD rootkit nonsense, every game console, satellite TV cards, analog cable TV, on and on, all broken.
I'm confident google/youtube wishes there weren't applications like FreeTube and yt-dlp. The fact of the matter is it's practically impossible to exclude them but still keep their own ecosystem functioning at an acceptable cost and with consumer buy in.
Because they don't want to get sued for monopolistic practices, I guess. Since the Goo owns Chrome and Youtube, Youtube blocking non-chrome user agents would be actionable.
Even if they whitelisted Safari, that would still be actionable.
Any competent lawyer could easily make the argument that that is a false equivalence.
They're not being forced to provide a service for free, they're not being allowed to ostracize essentially the only browser with any meaningful percentage of users that doesn't use their web engine as that is an anti-competitive and monopolistic practice.
Federation is the open source answer to microservices.
Every time I see a new decentralized website project I feel it would be 10 times better if it was just centralized and open source like mediawiki or phpbb.
Something must be wrong with me. This sentence would sound so lame to the average person and yet it sounds fascinating to me. I wish I had the title of "the leading expert on buttons."
I really LOVE how the WHOLE article is about BUTTONS BUTTONS BUTTONS. It really clears any doubt about her expertise. It's not an exaggeration. It's an actual leading expert on buttons!
>The blind community had to fight for years to make touchscreens more accessible. It’s always been funny to me that we call them touchscreens. We think about them as a touch modality, but a touchscreen prioritizes the visual.
Really interesting observation. In order to press virtual buttons, you have to look at the screen to figure out whether the button is (unless it's a full-width button at the bottom). Physical buttons generally don't require this in order to be pushed. They may still require this if the action the button performs depends on a state that is indicated by a screen, e.g. a menu where you have directional buttons to change the selected item.