Re:Don't Copy-Paste from Website to Terminal
by jiggy2011 on Sunday April 07, 2013 @04:31PM
(#5508626)
Thing is that the ever more complicated web is a response to demand, from developers and from users.
If at some point we had said "the web is powerful enough now, let's stop" then inevitably somebody like Microsoft or Google would have developed some other system that incorporated everything that the web does + extra stuff. In fact that's basically what stuff like Flash/ActiveX was in the late 90s.
Then gradually people would have switched to this new thing and the web would have gone the way of gopher and usenet.
Of course, if we could have redesigned the web from scratch right now with all the benefit of hindsight we could have (in theory) designed a better system. But as with most open things they rely on evolution rather than intelligent design.
I would want this "text-reading system" for example to have something like CSS. The difference would be that instead of creating ever-more powerful versions of CSS and Javascript, the architects and implementors of the text-reading system would pay attention to gotchas like the gotcha described in the OP (changing browsers so that what is copied into the clipboard is exactly the visible text the user has highlighted).