Would be nice to see the same sort of aggressive policing in Brave posts, that are constantly rife with attacks and misinformation.
Aside from that, in this case its pretty obvious you're letting yourself be used as a suppression vehicle by FOSS crazies ramming the flag button. Would have been nice to see a more neutral action being taken instead of choosing a side.
Your comment was completely unrelated to the Show HN - a place for people to discuss and receive feedback on their work. No side-choosing needed here other than that of the original author and the people who want to talk about the thing being showhn.
WebHID is related, especially because usually on every single post involving WebHID you’ll have people bringing up how it’s not a real standard.
That also segues into something I’ve mentioned before: moderation needs to be consistent. Randomly picking when to pull the trigger and when not is a bunch of crap.
Everything is related to everything somehow. You can't start dumb flamewars on HN and it's especially bad form to start them in people's Show HN, that's all.
Sure. The flamewar is this thread. And it starts with things like "you’ll see Firefox diehards froth at the mouth" which is not an invitation to curious conversation (the aspirational goal of the site) but a call for other flamewarriors to come out and play. You can't talk to people or really about most people like that on HN, which I'm sure you've seen in the guidelines. Same goes for the grumpsneer edit you tacked on after getting downvoted and flagged.
As such I agree that Firefox refusing to implement things like WebSerial and WebHID is shooting themselves in the foot, and will only drive more users towards Blink.
You could have made your point in a less inflammatory way, though.
Allowing serial but not HID would be really strange. With HID you get standard identifiers that let you filter out devices that are too dangerous for the web. With serial you get nothing. Even if you know a device is dangerous, there's no way to protect users from it.
You could acquaint yourself with the timeline of WebHID.
Google presented a "spec" that wasn't even a spec. They were asked to create a better spec. Instead they just shipped WebHID, and several months later dumped several hundred pages of specifications saying "there".
Whatever your position on hardware standards are, this is not how standards are presented.
Edit: the status of WebHID is literally "not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track." and it's current state is barely above "scratched on a napkin". But Google couldn't care less
WebHID is work done under Web Platform Incubator Community Group, wicg. http://wicg.io
There's tons of work done with this group, and it is very much a genuine, multi-party attempt to standardize out specs.
I have a hard time believing this is an innocent mistake you've made, portraying such a stark "Google couldn't care less" dark-world fantasy. Over something very normal very boring and very commonly done by everyone in the web community. Yes, the web is bigger than w3c today. It has been for a long long long time now. HTML5 isnt w3c either, but no one is saying the sky is falling because of that.
That's a great link. Even knowing Dmiitri as famously one of the most antagonistic negative people on the web, it's still a bad look. Someone jumping in to point out the team took >two years to do the work & turn it on also seems a lot less wild than much of the selectively portrayed versions.
As Google said in the comments there, they already knew there was strong opposition in principle to this spec, and that they wouldnt get cooperation advancing it, and hence didn't spend as much time doing spec work as they normally would have.
Chrome themselves seem very apologetic about it & to my knowledge this has not happened again.
The other huge missing piece of the picture here is that Chrome didn't write this spec de novo. A huge huge huge amount of the work in writing webhid is re exposing existing USB hid standards & data structures. There should still be a good web spec & this was a failure, but the team was wrapping something that's already very well defined & that they didn't have a ton of leeway to shape and change.
So no one was going to provide meaningful feedback (just, we won't work on this feedback), and the spec was already 3/4 set in stone before work started converting it to a web spec.
It's still a dark-world fantasy to me. And it's deceitful, brazenly incorrect, & full of slanted malice to say chrome isn't or even wasn't interested in standardizations. It's super dodgy quoting the spec saying this ain't a w3c spec as proof that the team doesn't care. That is, you citing, "not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track." That's a epic & wild distortion, taking advantage of people's ignorance to make Chrome look bad when in fact using groups like https://wicg.io is how tons of amazing great work happens, is a place where all browsers have been bringing new work for a while. You'd have to say Safari and Mozilla don't care about the web too if you want to dump on Chrome here for using wicg to standardize.
There is probably a point of view in here where Google is being stupid, lazily pushing like WebHID without any kind of standards support - like they've done countless times before. But Mozilla is also being stupid about clutching impractically tight to their ideals in a way that harms their users.
Mozilla has done it many times in the past when they tried to only support open-source codecs or refused to implement the DRM black box. In practice, at the time that meant on Firefox you used Adobe Flash for any video playback, and Chrome had a native `<video>` implementation. Even now, due to DRM differences, Netflix maxes out at 720p in Firefox, but 1080p in Chrome, and 4K in Edge.
That's literally the W3C standards process!!! W3C standard are supposed to start with a single vendor implementation, then a draft spec, then collaboration and multiple implementation from other vendors, and THEN a final W3C Standard Specification. The very reason why this spec is not on the standard track is because Mozilla refuses to implement it in Firefox.
Yes, your supposed to have an implementation, but your not supposed to release it into the wild without a working spec and without working it the potential issues.
Did you just miss entire premise of the article, how WebHID made the lives of a bunch of working people much better? Would you rather make these people have a much more difficult time now so Firefox diehard can have a “proper” WebHID in 5 years..?
My phone app would work much better if Android would drop all of its security measures and just let my app access everything on the system. That would make the lives of the bunch of people who use my app much better.
There's nothing "die hard" about wanting to create a proper standard (and being aware of the trade offs) instead of just implementing whatever Google deigns worthy of throwing up.
Now Firefox cannot even implement the "proper HID" because Google has already shipped their version
I mean, its a pretty binary choice. You'd rather have these repairmen (who are laymen at tech) suffer a really crappy workflow just to have a more "pure" solution in an ephemeral point in the future.
However, if you believe that the choice is binary, how's this for a measure: world's largest advertising and tracking company with the world's most dominant browser should not be able to just shove whatever it wants into the browser with full disregard for any and all concerns.
