Bruce Lawson on browser guidance
By glazou on Tuesday 9 September 2008, 13:30 - Standards - Permalink
I finally met Bruce Lawson during the first day of last CSS WG face-to-face meeting in Cambridge, UK, and I carefully read his last article on webstandards.org. I can't help but thinking the webstandards community could take a better approach. Utopically, the best approach would be IMHO the following one:
- build an extension to every single available browser that
- allows the user to file a usability bug report related to the current site/page for the current browser
- shows if there are open bugs related to the current site/page for the current browser and allows to browse/edit theme
- shows if the user filed bugs related to the current site/page for the current browser that are still open and allows to browse/edit them
- make that extension freely available
Then edit a automated monthly report with top 1000 buggy sites, world-wide and per country. That would put a huge pressure on website managers...
As I said, it's a utopy. But the gap between utopy and reality is not always that thick...
Comments
I've often wondered about a way of getting feedback to websites. The idea I had (which I'm sure isn't very original):
- the one means of communication we have with the website owner is via the urls in the access log. But its not enough room to communicate a bug report.
- So, report bugs about example.com using the firefox tool, or write a blog post about it - whatever. The point is to get an url where the bug report lives.
- now do a HEAD request on http: //example.com/?bug_reported_at=[url of bug report].
This makes it trivial for webmasters to harvest bug reports; there is a rich ecology of log mining tools. No agreement would be required on where the bugs go - although that'd be nice - just a naming convention. So with a shove and a push at, say, whatwg, to nail down the convention, firefox could build this into the broken website tool /now/ and the other tools could catch up when they're ready.
There are other ways to do this - (eg) a HEAD request for an arbitrary URL with a Bug-Report header, which allows the bug to be reported against the url with the problem - but the simple ?bug_report_at= convention is more likely to be spotted by webmasters who aren't aware of a new standard.
Like you say though - its just a utopian dream. In reality webmasters would just get sent links to spam or worse.