As Doug noted, these concerns are rational, especially among the
rational. Maybe it helps keep the laissez faire care-free development
in check, and these are the ones who are not following standards and
ethical engineering practice.
Nonetheless, I speak of backward compatibility. Like your
wordtothewise.com web site not breaking down because I have javascript
disabled for your web site. It will be irrational, to me, for any
organization worth its (visiting) salt to force javascript in order to
operate.
You point is well taken - at some point Pareto's principle come into
play. But you still need to be careful of ignoring potential security
holes. If one doesn't care, then has history has proven and continues
to show, it generally becomes a problem for the relevant.
I think it would be "stupid" for a MUA designer for example to force
javascript in order to support DKIM - that would be security oxymoron.
--
Sincerely
Hector Santos
http://www.santronics.com
Steve Atkins wrote:
On Apr 18, 2009, at 2:29 PM, Hector Santos wrote:
What bothers me though is that much of whats going on is being done by
14-18 years old who IMO lack experience in social engineering and
ethical design considerations. To them the idea of COOKIES and
JAVASCRIPT being disabled is unthinkable.
The lesson here is that irrational paranoia can damage useful
http standards. Also, that you shouldn't limit your use to the lowest
common denominator, the most irrationally paranoid of the
paranoids. When a potential user is 4 or 5 sigmas away from
normal behaviour, they're probably irrelevant.
There's probably a more general lesson about ignoring the
extremists while doing application - or protocol - development,
and catering to what the vast majority of normal, rational users
will find useful. As opposed to, say, catering to what only a tiny
fraction of users want at the expense of the vast majority.
Cheers,
Steve
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