Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?
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Hey, when I was a kid, I was inadvertently trained to wait. Windows 3.11 took forever and a day to boot up.
The fact that we don't have to wait ungodly amounts of time for pages to load is a good thing, and going back the other way is a huge step backwards.
I like js as much as the next guy, but a site shouldn't need javascript to run. Content is content.
This isn't the site I'm thinking about (don't go here, it made my CPU , so bitcoin mining script maybe?), but there's some other dev blog that gets linked to every now and again, that loads in milliseconds. I read comments about how it's so fast (!!), but really, shouldn't all sites strive to load that quickly...?
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@lorne-kates No, I mean immediately immediately. Update Firefox and you should be good.
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@slavdude said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
Yet another reason to avoid Gmail. I just hope other email providers have a way to disable this shit. I mean, come on. It's bad enough that Yahoo shows videos in empty mailboxes with no way to turn them off. This seems to go beyond the pale and provide Google with yet another way to steal your data to serve you ads.
Steal your data? Which part of this steals your data? Not to mention it had access to it in the first place, since, y'know, you're storing your emails on their server.
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@pie_flavor said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@lorne-kates No, I mean immediately immediately. Update Firefox and you should be good.
Yeah. No. @lorne-kates is right.
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@slavdude said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
It's bad enough that Yahoo shows videos in empty mailboxes with no way to turn them off.
Huh?
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@julianlam said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
I like js as much as the next guy, but a site shouldn't need javascript to run. Content is content.
I am the next guy. Does that mean you utterly loathe JS and think that, as one humorist put it:
1995 - Brendan Eich reads up on every mistake ever made in designing a programming language, invents a few more, and creates LiveScript. Later, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of Java the language is renamed JavaScript. Later still, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of skin diseases the language is renamed ECMAScript.
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@dcon said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@pie_flavor said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@lorne-kates No, I mean immediately immediately. Update Firefox and you should be good.
Yeah. No. @lorne-kates is right.
WOMM. Complex pages with AMP are significantly faster than complex pages without AMP.
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@slavdude said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
It's bad enough that Yahoo shows videos in empty mailboxes with no way to turn them off.
You can click the X at the right end of the toolbar with all the other buttons, but yeah there's no setting to permanently disable them.
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@pie_flavor said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@dcon said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@pie_flavor said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@lorne-kates No, I mean immediately immediately. Update Firefox and you should be good.
Yeah. No. @lorne-kates is right.
WOMM. Complex pages with AMP are significantly faster than complex pages without AMP.
That's great, but we're talking about emails here, not web pages. You know, a bit of text with a few images maybe.
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@deadfast Maybe you send bits of text with a few images maybe. But there's lots of really annoyingly complex HTML emails out there.
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@pie_flavor said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@deadfast Maybe you send bits of text with a few images maybe. But there's lots of really annoyingly complex HTML emails out there.
Yes, and these should go perform some of those acts @Lorne-Kates likes to talk about. Even then, I never had a problem with one of those loading too slowly so I can't imagine what exactly this is trying to solve.
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@pie_flavor said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@deadfast Maybe you send bits of text with a few images maybe. But there's lots of really annoyingly complex HTML emails out there.
Searching for emails more complicated than "text with a few pictures"....
image spam
No, couldn't really find anything really. And all of these were loaded practically the moment the stupid flip animation ended because guess what? They're just a few images and text.
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@pie_flavor said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@dcon said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@pie_flavor said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@lorne-kates No, I mean immediately immediately. Update Firefox and you should be good.
Yeah. No. @lorne-kates is right.
WOMM. Complex pages with AMP are significantly faster than complex pages without AMP.
What about complex pages without any JavaScript whatsoever?
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@coderpatsy said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
It's @ben_lubar 's version of mining in your browser. Only he forgot the part where it uploads the results for him to see.
He uploads dwarfs to your browser to do the mining? It all makes sense now!
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@lorne-kates said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
.... those are .vbs attachments in Outlook Express.
tell me more!
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@lorne-kates said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@polygeekery said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@el_heffe said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
“With AMP for Email, it’s easy for information in email messages to be dynamic, up-to-date and actionable.”
No. Just fucking no.
...those are IMs.
.... those are .vbs attachments in Outlook Express.
I'll admit I was left wondering why nobody seemed to remember "Zones" in IE4/Active Desktop and Lookout Distress, where you could configure whether scripts in emails were allowed to access your computer, and even whether they got run. Just in case you missed it, that was scripts in emails. In 1998.
EDIT: Twenty fucking years ago. There is NOTHING new under the sun.
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@pie_flavor said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
But there's lots of really annoyingly complex HTML emails out there.
Where to find annoyingly complex HTML mails (that lack plain text equivalents):
OK, I have a second category for stuff that isn't straight up spam, like stupid newsletters/notifications with plenty of HTML funk. Those simply bypass the inbox and get filed in some directory that I never look at.
Incidentally, it seems that facebook is still happily sending me a bunch of notifications that I never read. It's been at least 2 years since I last logged in there. Plenty of "<name> get back to facebook in one click!" and "<name> it seems you have trouble logging in to facebook". Nah man, no trouble, just CBA.
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@cvi said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
Incidentally, it seems that facebook is still happily sending me a bunch of notifications that I never read. It's been at least 2 years since I last logged in there. Plenty of "<name> get back to facebook in one click!" and "<name> it seems you have trouble logging in to facebook". Nah man, no trouble, just CBA.
Pfft. I keep getting mail from FB telling me that lots has happened on Facebook since I last logged in, and "you have 1 notification". Wow, that's a whole hell of a lot, guys.
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@steve_the_cynic Yeah, but do you have more "friends" on facebook than you think you do?
Actually, this made me click on one of the mails from facebook, and there's a dozen or so friend requests that I potentially could be convinced to feel slightly bad about ignoring. Fortunately, the mails don't say from whom, so I can pretend-presume that they are spam, and have apathy have another victory over facebook.
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@masonwheeler said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@slavdude said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
It's bad enough that Yahoo shows videos in empty mailboxes with no way to turn them off.
Huh?
I did. Firefox + Adblock and they were there. But only on empty inboxes.
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@cvi said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@steve_the_cynic Yeah, but do you have more "friends" on facebook than you think you do?
Actually, this made me click on one of the mails from facebook, and there's a dozen or so friend requests that I potentially could be convinced to feel slightly bad about ignoring. Fortunately, the mails don't say from whom, so I can pretend-presume that they are spam, and have apathy have another victory over facebook.
I have a small number of actual friends on FB, and I get "suggestions" of a host of people I haven't met and in all probability will never meet. (One of my FBFriends is an artist who lives in Paris and exhibits her work in various places. FB proposes all manner of other people in and around the art world on the grounds that I might know them, and I know exactly none of them.)
EDIT: but that doesn't mean that I don't have other real-world friends that are on FB, just that I don't know who they are, and FB doesn't know either.
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Status: has no real friends...
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@dcon said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
I did. Firefox + Adblock and they were there. But only on empty inboxes.
Maybe it's Flashblock then?
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@steve_the_cynic said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
Pfft. I keep getting mail from FB telling me that lots has happened on Facebook since I last logged in, and "you have 1 notification". Wow, that's a whole hell of a lot, guys.
Well, not to be a , but a lot did happen on Facebook, just none of it involved you or I
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@coderpatsy said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
It's @ben_lubar 's version of mining in your browser.
Mining videos of mining.
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@julianlam said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
but a lot did happen on Facebook
Imagine if GMail sent you a notification any time anyone received an email. "There are _______ unread messages. You know, total. Across all accounts. We just thought you might want to know."
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@julianlam said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
Thinking about AMP makes my brain hurt because it's not syntactically valid HTML.
Is it? The specification permits attribute name to be any codepoint except the special ones and unknown attributes are to be ignored. Yes, it includes absurd sequences of combining characters and non-ASCII whitespace and lot of other stuff that it probably shouldn't, but it does. And the rest is just fallback for clients that don't understand the special attribute, so there shouldn't be anything invalid there. So as far as I can tell it actually is syntactically valid.
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@julianlam said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
a lot did happen on Facebook
That's highly debatable at the best of times, but if it did happen, it certainly didn't happen for me.
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@pie_flavor said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@deadfast Maybe you send bits of text with a few images maybe. But there's lots of really annoyingly complex HTML emails out there.
So what Google is saying is, it would be a terrific idea if people sent more of this annoyingly complex HTML shit that has additional value almost exclusively for spa
^H^H^H
Hthe advertising industry, because they, Google, have the technology to make that shit not display quite as annoyingly slowly as it otherwise would, though still several orders of magnitude slower than a Real MUA.What about … NO?
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@pie_flavor said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
annoyingly complex HTML emails
Right on the money.
I have all my clients set to show the plaintext version of the email by default. Do you know how often I even look at the HTML version? Twice a month, maybe.
Which leads me to conclude: 90-99% of all serious email communication can be done in plaintext (no, I don't care about your company logo, as important as you think it is). The rest is rare exceptions and marketing wankery, spam or otherwise.
In closing: just remove fucking HTML completely and make mail clients capable of showing any attached images inline using simple syntax (hell, I'll take markdown, sure). Combine that with capability to not load images until requested and you solved the problem completely, without inventing new technologies and breaking shit.
And marketers? Send me an URL. Look, if I'm willing to waste time scrolling through your email, clicking one extra link means nothing to me in the grand scheme of things.
INB4 "you're not most people" and "they want something to catch your eye". I won't shed tears if manipulative marketing tactics start failing. They'll figure new ones out anyway (like when they used to do imagemaps, remember when they were doing imagemaps?).
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@onyx said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
And marketers?
FUCK. THEM.
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@mrl said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@onyx said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
And marketers?
FUCK. THEM.
No thanks. I have some pride.
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@lorne-kates said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
If by "immediately" you mean "immediately after showing a spinner for 5-10 seconds while the site loads non-immediately".
Our intranet here takes over 1 minute for each click, it's been like that for a few months already. When I complained they said it's working as expected.
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@laoc said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
still several orders of magnitude slower than a Real MUA.
How fast are make up artists?
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@steve_the_cynic said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
Just in case you missed it, that was scripts in emails. In 1998.
It wasn't original then (I remember scripts-in-emails from before that point), and at that point there were also systems out there that could do effective sandboxing to stop shenanigans. Not that that was part of the MS gameplan at that point. (For many years after, the single biggest security problem of the MS ecosystem was the way Outlook “threw random stuff over the wall” by default.)
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@tsaukpaetra said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
Status: has no real friends...
Multiply through by ±i to turn your imaginary friends in to real ones!
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@dkf said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@steve_the_cynic said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
Just in case you missed it, that was scripts in emails. In 1998.
It wasn't original then (I remember scripts-in-emails from before that point), and at that point there were also systems out there that could do effective sandboxing to stop shenanigans. Not that that was part of the MS gameplan at that point. (For many years after, the single biggest security problem of the MS ecosystem was the way Outlook “threw random stuff over the wall” by default.)
It's the same story for 100th time.
- So we have this data transportation channel, which works perfectly well...
- Let's make it programmable!
- What a splendid idea. I see nothing but benefits. Let's do it right now!
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@dkf But won't that turn my real friends ima--
Oh... :(
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@jaloopa said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
still several orders of magnitude slower than a Real MUA.
How fast are make up artists?
I don't know, all the benchmarks you find are completely made up.
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@bulb said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@julianlam said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
Thinking about AMP makes my brain hurt because it's not syntactically valid HTML.
Is it? The specification permits attribute name to be any codepoint except the special ones and unknown attributes are to be ignored. Yes, it includes absurd sequences of combining characters and non-ASCII whitespace and lot of other stuff that it probably shouldn't, but it does. And the rest is just fallback for clients that don't understand the special attribute, so there shouldn't be anything invalid there. So as far as I can tell it actually is syntactically valid.
I'm probably mistaken then... I always thought stuff like this:
<style amp-boilerplate>
wasn't allowed because you're technically only allowed to make up your own attributes if you prepend them withdata-
.Which is ironic because NodeBB uses
component
attributes... I'm well aware of this already :smiling_face_with_open_mouth_smiling_eyes:
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@julianlam I thought that was because of the issue of registration; who gets to decide what a particular attribute means? The
data-
ones are specifically reserved for apps to do what they want with, but other ones can be used for other purposes.HTML has always been largely based on paving the cowpaths. Usually the paving is made out of but even so…
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Don't forget features that exist purely for backwards compatibility purposes!
Did you know that if you
<input type="text" id="derp" />
,derp
becomes a global variable? Because raisins?
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@julianlam said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
but there's some other dev blog that gets linked to every now and again, that loads in milliseconds.
Gary Berndhart (former blogger, now runs Destroy All Software)?
The page is 181k and loads in 300ms on my connection. Everything (styles, images, everything) is inlined in the html page. He made it a point that he was going to build that because he was sick as fuck of bloated pages being 1MB and taking 10 seconds to load.
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@pie_flavor said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@lorne-kates No, I mean immediately immediately. Update Firefox and you should be good.
Ah, right, you're a discodev, so you have your own meaning for words.
Time to add another entry to the Discopædia
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@steve_the_cynic said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@cvi said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
Incidentally, it seems that facebook is still happily sending me a bunch of notifications that I never read. It's been at least 2 years since I last logged in there. Plenty of "<name> get back to facebook in one click!" and "<name> it seems you have trouble logging in to facebook". Nah man, no trouble, just CBA.
Pfft. I keep getting mail from FB telling me that lots has happened on Facebook since I last logged in, and "you have 1 notification". Wow, that's a whole hell of a lot, guys.
I still get emails telling me I have "1 poke" from Facebook.
I know it's there, but I refuse to clear it. It's from a friend who died. So, it's kinda nice knowing it's there.
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@steve_the_cynic said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
an artist who lives in Paris and exhibits her work in various places
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@ben_lubar said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@julianlam said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
but a lot did happen on Facebook
Imagine if GMail sent you a notification any time anyone received an email. "There are _______ unread messages. You know, total. Across all accounts. We just thought you might want to know."
Good thing Microsoft doesn't do that with Hotmail, because they'd probably forget to exclude the email they just sent.
Inbox:
Thu Feb 22, 10:00:00.000am From Hotmail - There are 82,023,655,239,100 unread messages
Thu Feb 22, 10:00:00.001am From Hotmail - There are 82,023,655,239,101 unread messages
Thu Feb 22, 10:00:00.002am From Hotmail - There are 82,023,655,239,102 unread messages
Thu Feb 22, 10:00:00.003am From Hotmail - There are 82,023,655,239,103 unread messages
Thu Feb 22, 10:00:00.004am From Hotmail - There are 82,023,655,239,104 unread messages
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@mrl said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
@onyx said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
And marketers?
FUCK. THEM.
.... camel cocks and razor wire.
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@julianlam said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
but there's some other dev blog that gets linked to every now and again, that loads in milliseconds. I read comments about how it's so fast (!!), but really, shouldn't all sites strive to load that quickly...?
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@bb36e said in Google wants to make e-mail more "interactive" - what could possibley go wrong?:
And blog.codinghorror.com takes the spot at the worst end of the scale with a "lead" of factor 2–7 against the second worst. Oh the irony!