Tags: os

The verbs of the web are GET and POST. In theory there’s also PUT, DELETE, and PATCH but in practice POST often does those jobs.

I’m always surprised when front-end developers don’t think about these verbs (or request methods, to use the technical term). Knowing when to use GET and when to use POST is crucial to having a solid foundation for whatever you’re building on the web.

Luckily it’s not hard to know when to use each one. If the user is requesting something, use GET. If the user is changing something, use POST.

That’s why links are GET requests by default. A link “gets” a resource and delivers it to the user.

<a href="/items/id">

Most forms use the POST method becuase they’re changing something—creating, editing, deleting, updating.

<form method="post" action="/items/id/edit">

But not all forms should use POST. A search form should use GET.

<form method="get" action="/search">
<input type="search" name="term">

When a user performs a search, they’re still requesting a resource (a page of search results). It’s just that they need to provide some specific details for the GET request. Those details get translated into a query string appended to the URL specified in the action attribute.

/search?term=value

I sometimes see the GET method used incorrectly:

• “Log out” links that should be forms with a “log out” button—you can always style it to look like a link if you want.
• “Unsubscribe” links in emails that immediately trigger the action of unsubscribing instead of going to a form where the POST method does the unsubscribing. I realise that this turns unsubscribing into a two-step process, which is a bit annoying from a usability point of view, but a destructive action should never be baked into a GET request.

When the it was first created, the World Wide Web was stateless by design. If you requested one web page, and then subsequently requested another web page, the server had no way of knowing that the same user was making both requests. After serving up a page in response to a GET request, the server promptly forgot all about it.

That’s how web browsing should still work. In fact, it’s one of the Web Platform Design Principles: It should be safe to visit a web page:

The Web is named for its hyperlinked structure. In order for the web to remain vibrant, users need to be able to expect that merely visiting any given link won’t have implications for the security of their computer, or for any essential aspects of their privacy.

The expectation of safe stateless browsing has been eroded over time. Every time you click on a search result in Google, or you tap on a recommended video in YouTube, or—heaven help us—you actually click on an advertisement, you just know that you’re adding to a dossier of your online profile. That’s not how the web is supposed to work.

Don’t get me wrong: building a profile of someone based on their actions isn’t inherently wrong. If a user taps on “like” or “favourite” or “bookmark”, they are actively telling the server to perform an update (and so those actions should be POST requests). But do you see the difference in where the power lies? With POST actions—fave, rate, save—the user is in charge. With GET requests, no one is supposed to be in charge—it’s meant to be a neutral transaction. Alas, the reality of today’s web is that many GET requests give more power to the dossier-building servers at the expense of the user’s agency.

The very first of the Web Platform Design Principles is Put user needs first :

If a trade-off needs to be made, always put user needs above all.

The current abuse of GET requests is damage that the web needs to route around.

Browsers are helping to a certain extent. Most browsers have the concept of private browsing, allowing you some level of statelessness, or at least time-limited statefulness. But it’s kind of messed up that private browsing is the exception, while surveillance is the default. It should be the other way around.

Firefox and Safari are taking steps to reduce tracking and fingerprinting. Rejecting third-party coookies by default is a good move. I’d love it if third-party JavaScript were also rejected by default:

In retrospect, it seems unbelievable that third-party JavaScript is even possible. I mean, putting arbitrary code—that can then inject even more arbitrary code—onto your website? That seems like a security nightmare!

I imagine if JavaScript were being specced today, it would almost certainly be restricted to the same origin by default.

Chrome has different priorities, which is understandable given that it comes from a company with a business model that is currently tied to tracking and surveillance (though it needn’t remain that way). With anti-trust proceedings rumbling in the background, there’s talk of breaking up Google to avoid monopolistic abuses of power. I honestly think it would be the best thing that could happen to Chrome if it were an independent browser that could fully focus on user needs without having to consider the surveillance needs of an advertising broker.

But we needn’t wait for the browsers to make the web a safer place for users.

Developers write the code that updates those dossiers. Developers add those oh-so-harmless-looking third-party scripts to page templates.

What if we refused?

Front-end developers in particular should be the last line of defence for users. The entire field of front-end devlopment is supposed to be predicated on the prioritisation of user needs.

And if the moral argument isn’t enough, perhaps the technical argument can get through. Tracking users based on their GET requests violates the very bedrock of the web’s architecture. Stop doing that.

I told you about how I’m using the Web Audio API on The Session to generate synthesised audio of each tune setting. I also said:

Except for some weirdness on iOS that I had to fix.

Here’s that weirdness…

Let me start by saying that this isn’t anything to do with requiring a user interaction (the Web Audio API insists on some kind of user interaction to prevent developers from having auto-playing sound on websites). All of my code related to the Web Audio API is inside a click event handler. This is a different kind of weirdness.

First of all, I noticed that if you pressed play on the audio player when your iOS device is on mute, then you don’t hear any audio. Seems logical, right? Except if using the same device, still set to mute, you press play on a video or audio element, the sound plays just fine. You can confirm this by going to Huffduffer and pressing play on any of the audio elements there, even when your iOS device is set on mute.

So it seems that iOS has different criteria for the Web Audio API than it does for audio or video. Except it isn’t quite that straightforward.

On some pages of The Session, as well as the audio player for tunes (using the Web Audio API) there are also embedded YouTube videos (using the video element). Press play on the audio player; no sound. Press play on the YouTube video; you get sound. Now go back to the audio player and suddenly you do get sound!

It’s almost like playing a video or audio element “kicks” the browser into realising it should be playing the sound from the Web Audio API too.

This was happening on iOS devices set to mute, but I was also getting reports of it happening on devices with the sound on. But it’s that annoyingly intermittent kind of bug that’s really hard to reproduce consistently. Sometimes the sound doesn’t play. Sometimes it does.

Following my theory that the browser needs a “kick” to get into the right frame of mind for the Web Audio API, I resorted to a messy little hack.

In the event handler for the audio player, I generate the “kick” by playing a second of silence using the JavaScript equivalent of the audio element:

var audio = new Audio('1-second-of-silence.mp3');
audio.play();

I’m not proud of that. It’s so hacky that I’ve even wrapped the code in some user-agent sniffing on the server, and I never do user-agent sniffing!

Still, if you ever find yourself getting weird but inconsistent behaviour on iOS using the Web Audio API, this nasty little hack could help.

I’ve been watching The Right Stuff on Disney Plus. It’s a modern remake of the ’80s film of the ’70s Tom Wolfe book of ’60s events.

It’s okay. The main challenge, as a viewer, is keeping track of which of the seven homogenous white guys is which. It’s like Merry, Pippin, Ant, Dec, and then some.

It’s kind of fun watching it after watching For All Mankind which has some of the same characters following a different counterfactual history.

The story being told is interesting enough (although Tom has pointed out that removing the Chuck Yeager angle really diminishes the narrative). But ultimately the tension is manufactured around a single event—the launch of Freedom 7—that was very much in the shadow of Gargarin’s historic Vostok 1 flight.

There are juicier stories to be told, but those stories come from Russia.

Some of these stories have been told in film. The Spacewalker told the amazing story of Alexei Leonov’s mission, though it messes with the truth about what happened with the landing and recovery—a real shame, considering that the true story is remarkable enough.

Imagine an alternative to The Right Stuff that relayed the drama of Soyuz 1—it’s got everything: friendship, rivalries, politics, tragedy…

I’d watch the heck out of that.

I started getting some emails recently from people having issues using The Session. The issues sounded similar—an interactive component that wasn’t, well …interacting.

When I asked what device or browser they were using, the answer came back the same: Safari on iPad. But not a new iPad. These were older iPads running older operating systems.

Now, remember, even if I wanted to recommend that they use a different browser, that’s not an option:

Safari is the only browser on iOS devices.

I don’t mean it’s the only browser that ships with iOS devices. I mean it’s the only browser that can be installed on iOS devices.

You can install something called Chrome. You can install something called Firefox. Those aren’t different web browsers. Under the hood they’re using Safari’s rendering engine. They have to.

It gets worse. Not only is there no choice when it comes to rendering engines on iOS, but the rendering engine is also tied to the operating system.

If you’re on an old Apple laptop, you can at least install an up-to-date version of Firefox or Chrome. But you can’t install an up-to-date version of Safari. An up-to-date version of Safari requires an up-to-date version of the operating system.

It’s the same on iOS devices—you can’t install a newer version of Safari without installing a newer version of iOS. But unlike the laptop scenario, you can’t install any version of Firefox of Chrome.

It’s disgraceful.

It’s particularly frustrating when an older device can’t upgrade its operating system. Upgrades for Operating system generally have some hardware requirements. If your device doesn’t meet those requirements, you can’t upgrade your operating system. That wouldn’t matter so much except for the Safari issue. Without an upgraded operating system, your web browsing experience stagnates unnecessarily.

For want of a nail…

• A website feature isn’t working so
• you need to upgrade your browser which means
• you need to upgrade your operating sytem but
• you can’t upgrade your operating system so
• you need to buy a new device.

Apple doesn’t allow other browsers to be installed on iOS devices so people have to buy new devices if they want to use the web. Handy for Apple. Bad for users. Really bad for the planet.

It’s particularly galling when it comes to iPads. Those are exactly the kind of casual-use devices that shouldn’t need to be caught in the wasteful cycle of being used for a while before getting thrown away. I mean, I get why you might want to have a relatively modern phone—a device that’s constantly with you that you use all the time—but an iPad is the perfect device to just have lying around. You shouldn’t feel pressured to have the latest model if the older version still does the job:

An older tablet makes a great tableside companion in your living room, an effective e-book reader, or a light-duty device for reading mail or checking your favorite websites.

Hang on, though. There’s another angle to this. Why should a website demand an up-to-date browser? If the website has been built using the tried and tested approach of progressive enhancement, then everyone should be able to achieve their goals regardless of what browser or device or operating system they’re using.

On The Session, I’m using progressive enhancement and feature detection everywhere I can. If, for example, I’ve got some JavaScript that’s going to use querySelectorAll and addEventListener, I’ll first test that those methods are available.

if (!document.querySelectorAll || !window.addEventListener) {
  // doesn't cut the mustard.
  return;
}

I try not to assume that anything is supported. So why was I getting emails from people with older iPads describing an interaction that wasn’t working? A JavaScript error was being thrown somewhere and—because of JavaScript’s brittle error-handling—that was causing all the subsequent JavaScript to fail.

I tracked the problem down to a function that was using some DOM methods—matches and closest—as well as the relatively recent JavaScript forEach method. But I had polyfills in place for all of those. Here’s the polyfill I’m using for matches and closest. And here’s the polyfill I’m using for forEach.

Then I spotted the problem. I was using forEach to loop through the results of querySelectorAll. But the polyfill works on arrays. Technically, the output of querySelectorAll isn’t an array. It looks like an array, it quacks like an array, but it’s actually a node list.

So I added this polyfill from Chris Ferdinandi.

That did the trick. I checked with the people with those older iPads and everything is now working just fine.

For the record, here’s the small collection of polyfills I’m using. Polyfills are supposed to be temporary. At some stage, as everyone upgrades their browsers, I should be able to remove them. But as long as some people are stuck with using an older browser, I have to keep those polyfills around.

I wish that Apple would allow other rendering engines to be installed on iOS devices. But if that’s a hell-freezing-over prospect, I wish that Safari updates weren’t tied to operating system updates.

Apple may argue that their browser rendering engine and their operating system are deeply intertwingled. That line of defence worked out great for Microsoft in the ‘90s.

I’ve been like a dog with a bone the way I’ve been pushing for a declarative option for the Web Share API in the shape of button type=“share”. It’s been an interesting window into the world of web standards.

The story so far…

• I blogged some half-formed thoughts.
• Then I opened an issue on the spec for the Web Share API.
• Meanwhile I wrote a polyfill, releasing the code and a test.
• I responded to pushback I was getting on the issue I filed.
• I also wrote up an explainer document so everything is gathered in one place.
• Finally I started soliciting feedback from people using the Web Share API in order to gather data.

That’s the situation currently. The general consensus seems to be that it’s probably too soon to be talking about implementation at this stage—the Web Share API itself is still pretty new—but gathering data to inform future work is good.

In planning for the next TPAC meeting (the big web standards gathering), Marcos summarised the situation like this:

Not blocking: but a proposal was made by @adactio to come up with a declarative solution, but at least two implementers have said that now is not the appropriate time to add such a thing to the spec (we need more implementation experience + and also to see how devs use the API) - but it would be great to see a proposal incubated at the WICG.

Now this where things can get a little confusing because it used to be that if you wanted to incubate a proposal, you’d have to do on Discourse, which is a steaming pile of crap that requires JavaScript in order to put text on a screen. But Šime pointed out that proposals can now be submitted on Github.

So that’s where I’ve submitted my proposal, linking through to the explainer document.

Like I said, I’m not expecting anything to happen anytime soon, but it would be really good to gather as much data as possible around existing usage of the Web Share API. If you’re using it, or you know anyone who’s using it, please, please, please take a moment to provide a quick description. And if you could help spread the word to get that issue in front of as many devs as possible, I’d be very grateful.

(Many thanks to everyone who’s already contributed to that issue—much appreciated!)