[Bug 6774] <mark> element: restrict insertion by other servers

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=6774





--- Comment #13 from Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>  2009-06-29 09:46:09 ---
> There's little or no technological control, but legal permission can be denied,
> and, for the most part, HTML standards already deny similar permissions to
> users. The public library, for example, is unlikely to do what it believes to
> be illegal.

This isn't the right forum to discuss legalities; I encourage you to take this
up with your legislature.


> Yahoo could have pulled the doc into a cache, written to it, and
> passed it to the user; the user would have known the URL not of the cache
> itself but of the point of origin, just as happens now when a user views a doc
> from a multi-day cache set up to save bandwidth and doesn't know about the
> cache because they typed the address into the address bar themselves and think
> the page came immediately from that address. Yahoo doesn't do that with the
> view-as-HTML files, but not for want of technology.

Actually, it _is_ for want of technology. There is no technical way to do what
you describe. If there was, the Web would not be sustainable, as criminals
could steal everyone's bank details overnight.


> We're not responsible for educating consumers to that degree. But inserting a
> tool by which a third party can make a user's perception of what they see that
> much more fragile goes beyond providing a language by which site designers can
> offer their content and people can read it (and, selectively, interact via
> forms, scripts, etc., consistent with site owners' intentions (third-party
> markup of forms and scripts might be something else to think about, too)).

I have no idea what you are saying here, sorry.


> "(. . . [N]or should there be [a "way for the originating server to stop"
> "software on the user's network [from] . . . chang[ing] . . . the page"], since
> that would mean that it would prevent users from doing what they wanted to the
> page)." (Hixie, supra.)
> 
> They have to be limited.

No, sorry, we are not limiting what users can do. That is counter to the entire
philosophy of the Web. The user must be able to have ultimate control over the
content he downloads.


> Many companies have customer contracts online, and I'm
> pretty sure they don't want users changing them without permission, e.g., by
> restyling them into white fonts on white backgrounds.

You can do that today in a multitude of ways (e.g. using Firebug, using user
style sheets, using Opera's cache editor, using a rewriting proxy, using the
user preference for colours, etc).

It is absolutely imperative and core to the whole principle of the Web and HTML
in particular that users be able to adapt the pages they use in ways that work
for them. Blind users listen to pages using speech synthesis, users with poor
eyesight make the pages black-and-white only with large fonts, different
computers use different fonts to view the Web, users of mobile phones shrink
pages to fit their small screens, etc.


> If an online store sells
> an item for $123, they don't want a user's employer restyling the rightmost
> digit of every item price into invisibility so the unaware user proves,
> through, say, a screen photograph, that the item is only $12.

They might not want this, but that's their problem. It's possible today and
HTML5 will not change this.


> Some courts
> publish case decisions and legal forms online, and doubtless want them left
> unchanged. A site owner cannot give up all control over their site or the
> Internet will be less useful to them in making offers and concluding business.

Site owners do not have control over their sites today. They don't have to give
any control up, because they don't have it in the first place.


> If the user wants to make changes, they have to be responsible for them, and
> that's denied if anyone else can intervene without the end user's knowledge.

Welcome to the Web. This is how it is. Your network administrator can change
what you see unless you use TLS (end-to-end encryption), and the administrator
of your local machine can change anything at all regardless.


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Received on Monday, 29 June 2009 09:46:18 UTC