

Dear Microsoft: Please Do Pinned Menus Like This - psadauskas
http://blog.theamazingrando.com/pinned-menus-with-the-link-element

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mrkurt
I mostly agree, with the exception of two things:

1) It's much easier to stick meta tags in HTML than it is to reference an
external file in many cases (blog hosting services, hosted storefronts, etc).

2) Sites that make the best use of that menu will have different data
depending on what page is pinned. We didn't do much implementation, but
assuming enough people used IE9 we'd probably make that set of meta tags page
dependent. Separating it into an external link when it's page specific data
doesn't make a bunch of sense. Particularly page specific data that changes
frequently.

Also, that 1kb of text is more like 260 bytes gzipped (as it is for us). We'll
survive. :)

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psadauskas
Interesting. I would have expected the Menu to be identical for a site or
application. Maybe have different ones for a forum vs a dashboard, but
identical between topics in the forum. What is the use-case for a different
menu per-page? Do you expect users to pin different pages?

And even gzipped, 260B * 1M pageviews/day is ~ 1GB a month. Plus the memory to
hold the text, the CPU to compress it, versus serving a static file from
Apache to the fraction of users the ask for it? Still sounds like a win.

Maybe make it even more like stylesheets: embeddable in the page or linkable
to another page.

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mfukar
1 GB a month? I download more than that in half an hour.

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SapphireSun
Also, if you have 1M viewers a month, that 1 GB is probably a drop in the
bucket.

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wccrawford
I have to agree with this article in that there is FAR too much text being
added to the webpage for this functionality. Separating it out into a separate
file is the way to go. You know, like CSS already does.

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sosuke
I wonder what the trade off is for 1KB of text or an extra HTTP request.

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scotth
Well...that's a good question from a performance standpoint, but it's more
than that. Readability is important too.

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Yzupnick
I up voted both these comments because it just goes to show that different
people care about different things. It is not a matter of better, just a
matter of preference.

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houseabsolute
Maybe I'm just out of touch, but does anyone actually use the pinned menu? If
no, does it matter how Microsoft decides to implement this? It seems like it's
a feature roughly on the importance level of their web snippets feature; that
is, not very important at all.

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zokier
Considering that it's a upcoming feature in IE9 which is yet to be released,
it is premature to say if anyone will actually use it.

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houseabsolute
There are already jumplists for other applications. That's what I was asking
about.

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noibl
Previous discussion for background:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704173>

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alextgordon
This guy totally called it: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704293> :)

~~~
noibl
Yeah, I was surprised not to see your sample XML in the article.

I really hope this appeal gains some traction. Pinning and jump-lists should
be seen as Windows 7 features, not IE9 features (which runs on Vista too).

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justinph
I'd put the odds of this feature even being used by most web developers at
about 10%. If no other browser supports it, what's the point?

It'd be much better if MS were to just take a page outline (from all the
headlines) that were links and make their menu out of that. Or, look at the
HTML5 <nav> elements. Then IE9 users might actually see it in use once in a
blue moon.

~~~
psadauskas
10% of the IE9 users is really a huge absolute number. It's probably larger,
too, when you consider it could become applicable to all browsers on Windows
7. If it gains traction, it or something similar might be picked up by OSX or
Gnome/KDE.

It's still worth investigating doing it right, instead of letting IE define
the standard, and letting it stagnate.

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count
Um, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that there will be at least one
major browser bug leading to a remote compromise from this feature. Maybe I'm
just paranoid...

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psadauskas
Perhaps, if the <link> points to a menu.xml you don't control? I'm not sure
what you could do with this that couldn't also be done with <link
rel=stylesheet>...

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count
Sorry, I wasn't more clear. I meant the browser feature, not the specific
implementation. I think the idea in the article was fantastic, and would be
much cleaner for developers.

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count
Why was this voted down so harshly?

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ars
It didn't deserve -1, but I guess it was downvoted because it's wrong?

Why would the existence of this feature lead to a remote compromise? The
specific implementation maybe, but the idea??

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count
My original comment deserved it then, not my clarification and praise of the
implementation idea in the article?

The idea of a website being able to inject things into the task bar menu seems
like it would open the door for injecting things that overflow buffers, call
other code, etc. What is the security model for that code? What are the limits
on what the URL can point to, etc.

It's not like the IE team has a stellar record for this kind of stuff?

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carussell
_It was always intended to be used by vendors for browser-specific features …
HTML5_

That's a pretty short time span for the definition of "always".

