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

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


Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
         Resolution|NEEDSINFO                   |INVALID




--- Comment #11 from Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>  2009-06-29 04:55:58 ---
There is no possible way to prevent a user agent running on the user's behalf
from doing whatever the user wants it to do, including adding annotations.

If the user installs software without knowing what that software does, there is
nothing we can do about that. The software can't know whether the user knows
about what it does or not.


> A public library near me already removed ads from Yahoo's email inbox page. The
> library staff told me they do that because users get confused. I saw the inbox
> pages. I saw page-editing can be done at a receiving server without slowing the
> downloading time at all noticeably. The particular method was to block page
> element replacements that came from non-Yahoo domains, which is arguably a
> crude way to edit, but other kinds of edits appear well within technological
> reach at the page-receiving end of a download.

There is no way to stop this.


> In Yahoo's search engine, I used a view-as-HTML link to view a document to
> which highlighting for my keywords were probably added in less than a second.
> While the URL of the HTML-equivalent document differed from the original doc's
> URL, that's probably for business and legal reasons, not because the technology
> made it impossible to claim the URL was the same, as retrieving a file through
> a cache or a proxy doesn't show the URL of the cache or the proxy but of the
> remote origin.

It is in fact for technical reasons; there is no way technically for Yahoo! to
affect the contents of a page at a URL it does not control.

Only the user agent's own software, or software on the user's network (e.g. the
library proxy server) can change the page, and those tools can change the page
regardless of what we put in the HTML page, there is no way for the originating
server to stop this (and nor should there be, since that would mean that it
would prevent users from doing what they wanted to the page).


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Received on Monday, 29 June 2009 04:56:15 UTC