I don't see how toast is different from the countless proposals for new declarative UI HTML elements that have been submitted over the years, and ignored or withdrawn (such as menu/menuitem), other than it coming from Google (and maybe Google not wanting to expose that functionality via a JavaScript API?) The reasoning against new UI elements has always been the same - they're inessential when JavaScript is needed anyway. I think this incident should make it very clear to everyone that HTML as seen by "browser vendors" (Google) is a very different thing from HTML the markup language as used all over the world for personal, business, medical, legal, and cultural documents, and which demands community representation and participation.
> I don't see how toast is different from the countless proposals for new declarative UI HTML elements that have been submitted over the years
The difference is that if Google introduces a new tag and starts using it, then every other vendor must implement the tag, or the [potentially popular] applications that use it [made by Google] will simply not work.
That's not a power that "countless proposals for new declarative UI HTML elements" have.
> I think this incident should make it very clear to everyone that HTML as seen by "browser vendors" (Google) is a very different thing from HTML the markup language as used all over the world for personal, business, medical, legal, and cultural documents, and which demands community representation and participation.
Google is not a browser vendor; they do not sell web browsers. Google sell advertising, and it's absolutely critical to Google's future to get everyone on the only web browser that has crippled ad blocking and privacy capabilities.
> The difference is that if Google introduces a new tag and starts using it
But Google isn't starting to use it? They're implementing it in Chrome to see whether any difficulties would arise when implementing the proposed API. If they do, that can serve as input. If not, input is still possible?
That’s a nice and (irrelevant) statistic. No one targets a “global” audience with a website. If I’m targeting North America, Europe, or Japan, why do I care that a billion people in India use Android phones? Even in countries where iOS is a sliver of the overall population like China and India, if you want to reach the affluent population, you still need to target iOS users.
How fast do you think someone creating a website in the US will get fired if they said they are going to ignore iOS users because iOS is only 15% of the global market?
If iOS didn’t matter do you think Google would be paying Apple a reported $9 billion a year to be the default search engine?
North America is about the only significant market where iOS has a ton of market share, and the world is not North America. If you're targeting Europe, iOS has only 25% [1]. Not sure why you said Japan instead of Asia, but iOS market share there is less than 15%; even worse than it is worldwide [2].
People don't have their browser choices etched in stone, and Google's services are a powerful form of persuasion. If they work in Chrome but not other browsers, people will just switch to Chrome.
It's not 2009 anymore. iOS simply doesn't give Apple the power to stop Google here.
And that still doesn’t negate my other point, if you exclude iOS, you miss the most affluent users. Who do you think is the most profitable market segment? People buying $50 Android phones or people buying $700 iPhones?
Apple doesn’t have to “stop” Google. If Apple doesn’t support it, either web developers wont use it because no one is going to give up their most affluent customers or they are going to be forced to write an app.
Again, if I’m writing a website for the US, why do I care about the worldwide market share?
> And that still doesn’t negate my other point, if you exclude iOS, you miss the most affluent users. Who do you think is the most profitable market segment? People buying $50 Android phones or people buying $700 iPhones?
If your service is free and you monetize by selling users' data, they're all the same. You don't have to sell things to your users to make money. Just look at Google!
> Again, if I’m writing a website for the US, why do I care about the worldwide market share?
Again, the world is not the US. If I'm making a website for Europe or China [1] or South Korea [2] or Vietnam [3], why do I care about the US or Japan market share?
If your service is free and you monetize by selling users' data, they're all the same. You don't have to sell things to your users to make money. Just look at Google!
Because users in the rest of the world who are not as affluent aren’t as attractive to advertisers. You are already seeing it with Google. Google just announced a year over year decline in net income as ad sales increased a lot slower than acquisition costs.
Google doesn’t “sell users data” it sells access to users to advertisers based on their data. Advertisers aren’t willing to pay as much for users data for much less affluent users
Again, the world is not the US. If I'm making a website for Europe or China [1] or South Korea [2] or Vietnam [3], why do I care about the US or Japan market share?
If you combine South Korea and Vietnam you probably have the GDP of a midsize state in the US. In China, if you want to reach the growing middle and upper class - you still have to support iOS.
> If they work in Chrome but not other browsers, people will just switch to Chrome.
On iOS, Chrome is just a wrapper around WebKit. You can't ship third-party web rendering engines on iOS. So if Apple doesn't implement this tag for Safari, Chrome on iOS won't have it either.
