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Write HTML Like It's 1999

bradleytaunt.com

161–170 of 191 posts

Re: Write HTML Like It's 1999

#161
post #76

Ironically, the lists on this page are paragraph tags.

Since the page is built on Jekyll, I'm guessing the article's HTML has been generated, thus explaining why paragraph tags are used.

Otherwise, one must explicitly use HTML to specify lists which is more laboriousa nd not as neat because of mixed content. In the end it works either way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Re: Write HTML Like It's 1999

#162
post #76

Ironically, the lists on this page are paragraph tags.

Since the page is built on Jekyll, I'm guessing the article's HTML has been generated, thus explaining why paragraph tags are used. Otherwise, one must explicitly use HTML to specify lists which is more laboriousa nd not as neat because of mixed content. In the end it works either way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I think I get what you’re saying, but let me repeat it to make sure I understand: Jekyll, and of course Markdown, sites can use unordered lists, but you would need to specify explicit HTML for custom bullet points because there’s no obvious way to generate list elements with a specific class in Markdown.

That makes sense. I initially was confused because unordered lists themselves are very easy in Markdown, and indeed will generate s.

Re: Write HTML Like It's 1999

#163

My God that page is beautiful. Over half the vertical space is content without me touching anything. No banner bar asking me to install some bullshit mobile app. No 800-pixel panel at the bottom telling me what a cookie is. No incredibly obnoxious warning that I only have one more free article before the wisdom of the ages is lost to me so I'd better cough up five bucks.

It is not bad, but on a regular monitor (1080p) the white space is about 60%. We don't need wide monitors just to use the center 40% of it, we cannot go Notepad style and use 100% width, I would prefer to use about 60%. That makes also the page shorter and requires less vertical scrolling. But this is picking on the page layout, not on the merits of the points in the article, that I mostly agree.

Depends on your setup. On my phone it was perfect. On my desktop the text column is about the size of a sheet of paper, which is again perfect for me. Widescreen monitors are great for filling in your peripheral vision when gaming but it's easier on the eyes to move your fovea 35 degrees of arc for every line instead of 75.

Re: Write HTML Like It's 1999

#164
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Content being heavily reliant on JavaScript “injection” Salient point right here. Being served a blank white page (when JS is disabled) can deter a person from ever visiting a site again. Some peope out there want to vet a site before allowing it to run arbitrary code on their machine.

> run arbitrary code on their machine That's a bit of an exaggeration. JavaScript is strongly sandboxed and has a pretty good permissions system. The only malicious things it can really do are 1) based on cookies or 2) crypto mining. Personally I think it's unreasonable to expect today's sites to work without JavaScript completely. The real benefits of using it sparingly are: - Pages load faster - Pages are more resp…

About the only time JavaScript is useful is something like google docs. The rest is just fluff and there’s no reason a webpage should require it.

Re: Write HTML Like It's 1999

#165
post #18

I've never understood the purpose of "semantic" html. It seems to be bandied about as some sort of unquestioned good, but why? If the code is easy to understand who cares that the "correct" tags have been used? Obviously there are some benefits for screen readers and search engines, but these uses should be explicitly checked for as part of a QA process instead of relying on some vague standard of semanticness.

Because the idea that one can separate content from presentation appears as an elegant Platonic ideal to a lot of folks. The trouble seems to be that content and presentation are not actually disjoint sets. And (a perhaps different) set of folks want a slice of the juicy middle.

Re: Write HTML Like It's 1999

#166
post #7

After reading the title, I thought I would see a proposal to use mostly tables instead of divs for designing websites again...

I still use tables. Always when I need to position things relative to each other and have them squish properly. I tried really hard to use/like divs but they are not helping me most of the time.

Re: Write HTML Like It's 1999

#167
post #138

As someone who has a pretty serious visual impairment, I find the attitude of so many of these comments really... disappointing. You wouldn't believe how much effort people with poor vision have to go to, to consume the modern web. You can't even take simple things for granted like being able to zoom. So many websites pollute their page with pointless navigation elements that block most of the content when the page i…

+++ I'd like to throttle the first person who ever decided that if the window width would not 'comfortably' accommodate their vision of the page, certain elements would just DISAPPEAR. Like GONE. When you have to zoom out to make hidden elements (not just hanging off the edge, as in never drawn) appear... someone has been naughty.

Just a week ago I wanted to factory-reset an old router before dumping it. Because my modern laptop doesn't have a LAN-connector, I used my old Eeepc with a 7" display.

Everything worked just fine until I was on the page where I was supposed to press the 'Confirm' button for the factory reset. It just wasn't anywhere and I was wondering what I was missing. So I started to dig into the framesets and finally found a frame where the code looked like there was that button.

Took me a while to find out how to press it (simply opening the frame in a separate window didn't work because there was some JS magic involved). The solution was to zoom out. So much fun when a task that was supposed to take 15 minutes takes 2 hours because someone built an over-the-top web-interface.

Re: Write HTML Like It's 1999

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, the majority of web devs don’t give a rat’s butt about those users.

All they do is complain, make special demands, then go on to block ads anyway. It makes it hard to care about those users.

Could've been different if web devs listened when they got told "your ads get overbearing, no one can even try to concentrate on the content anymore" - but they were greedy and ad blocking came about as self defense.

Re: Write HTML Like It's 1999

#169
post #18

I've never understood the purpose of "semantic" html. It seems to be bandied about as some sort of unquestioned good, but why? If the code is easy to understand who cares that the "correct" tags have been used? Obviously there are some benefits for screen readers and search engines, but these uses should be explicitly checked for as part of a QA process instead of relying on some vague standard of semanticness.

Why do anything properly? I look at 'div soup' HTML and shudder. The authors of it have not got a clue. They also make it hard for people who do write proper HTML with the correct tags, styling the elements and keeping the separation of concerns to do anything with it. It is about organising your content, if everything is in div tags you might as well just upload JPGs of your web pages, with different ones for deskto…

> you might as well just upload JPGs of your web pages

That was not so uncommon in 1999 :-(

Seriously, it's 2019 and some developers still don't get the value of semantic markup while this has been beaten to death for at least 20 years. this profession is cluttered with too many tourists. I even talk with devs bragging about the lack of care for markup.

Re: Write HTML Like It's 1999

#170
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do anything properly? I look at 'div soup' HTML and shudder. The authors of it have not got a clue. They also make it hard for people who do write proper HTML with the correct tags, styling the elements and keeping the separation of concerns to do anything with it. It is about organising your content, if everything is in div tags you might as well just upload JPGs of your web pages, with different ones for deskto…

> you might as well just upload JPGs of your web pages That was not so uncommon in 1999 :-( Seriously, it's 2019 and some developers still don't get the value of semantic markup while this has been beaten to death for at least 20 years. this profession is cluttered with too many tourists. I even talk with devs bragging about the lack of care for markup.

I wonder how well it would work to do that with JSON-LD micro-format markup.

Google don't care about HTML as they are way too clever for that. If I had more time I would like to see how they would rank two identical pages, one done properly and one that was a JPG image with a dangleberry of JSON-LD tacked on. I bet they latter would fare better!

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