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I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

blind.guru

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Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#271

Post by TeMPOraL »

adiabatty wrote: post #237
TeMPOraL wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am serious. Yes, it's true it's easier than ever to create sophisticated websites. But it's also true that almost all this sophistication delivers negative value to users - it distracts them, slows them down, and forces them to keep buying faster hardware. It doesn't have to be like this - but it currently is . It's not even just a problem of explicit business incentives - the technical side of the industry has bee…

> The "best practices" in web development and user experience all deoptimize end-user ergonomy and productivity. What are you seeing that leads you to think this? The ads and engagement drivers (autoplaying videos of other content on the site) on sites that need eyeballs to keep the lights on, or the articles showing how to download the minimum usable assets so you don't waste the user's bandwidth, battery, and disk…

The best practices that encourage you to minimize content and maximize whitespace on your screen. To change text for icons. To hijack the scrollbar. To replace perfectly good default controls with custom alternatives that look prettier, but lose most of the ergonomic features the default controls provided. To favor infinite scrolling. Etc.

Some "best practices" articles discourage all this, but in my experience, that's ignored. The trend is in ever decreasing density.

It all makes sense if you consider apps following the practices I mention as sales drivers and ad delivery vectors. Putting aside the ethical issues of building such things, my issue is that people take practices developed for marketing material, and reapply them to tools they build, without giving it any second thought.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#272

Post by TeMPOraL »

shadowgovt wrote: post #254
TeMPOraL wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I think a pizza ordering site is a good case for server-side and mostly static HTML. There's very few things on such page that change more often than every few days, and as for the dynamic stuff, all you really need to manage is a client-side basket, which is trivial in isolation. I believe you could easily cut the time spent on such site by a third if you approached it this way. Even more for people accessing th…

Heavy graphics with static HTML? That's going to be a crummy experience for mobile users.

CSS supports media queries.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#273

Post by juststeve »

asveikau wrote: post #66
1996 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

w3m gets a pass because javascript is bad. The FSF is right about that. wasm will be even worse. Not technically worse, but for removing another layer of control. DNS over HTTPS is just as bad in that sense. If you can make something without JS you should. cryptomarketplot.com has an accessible mode FOR CRYPTO!! If crypto sites can, everybody can.

It's funny because "javascript is bad" was common geek sentiment at the turn of the century. Now it is flamebait, or being caught up in the past [itself possibly a bit of a code for ageism]. Seeing this attitude change is one of the most interesting things I've seen in tech nerd circles in the last decade or so.

Can you elaborate on why it's funny? javascript (on it's own) has changed a lot in 20 years and it was originally designed in what, one week due to external time constraints? i think the criticisms are valid if $Your_favorite_language had ~4 days only for language design. From my recollection, there were no frameworks, no tooling, no linters, no jquery. it was a basically a primative language for browsers that had no compiler and didn't do anything useful (back in the 90's). About as exciting as VBA 1.0.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#274

Post by mlang23 »

apjana wrote: post #84
earenndil wrote: post #53

Try googler https://github.com/jarun/googler

Also ddgr: https://github.com/jarun/ddgr Same author, no tracking, works over Tor.

I like the idea behind DDGR. However, I was surprised that it doesnt offer a pager for search results. Whenever I search something, I need to use the scrollback buffer to actually see the first results... That is not very userfriendl, even for a CLI tool.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#275

Post by _8j50 »

mbrukman wrote: post #264

Hi Mario, I am an engineer on Google Search frontend. Thank you for posting this, and I'm really sorry and saddened to see this broken; this is certainly not intended behavior. I've reproduced the issue you described in the blog (Lynx does not allow clicking on the search results page). Even though Google serves valid HTML to Lynx, it's probably HTML that Lynx cannot parse, and since it used to work before, this is a…

Will bet good money this is due to your user-agent based content serving. I have similar issues with non-standard browsers I use. I don't know why google and google based sites (including recaptcha) are the only ones uaving this issue. It really is bad for the web to have this sort of user agent discrimination.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#276

Post by chopin »

UncleMeat wrote: post #75
dotancohen wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A faster horse. People value privacy when made aware of the issue, but very few people are aware of how websites track (and manipulate) them.

I feel like this claim needs support. All of the studies I'm aware of that ask people to choose between different price points based on privacy end up showing minimal valuing of privacy.

Counterpoint: all purchasing sites I used so far are tracking me (or at least try to). I am tracked although I pay for the site.

You have to factor in the fact that people know they are tracked whether they are paying or not. Given that fact I'd prefer not paying as well.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#277

Post by magicalist »

_8j50 wrote: post #275
mbrukman wrote: post #264

Hi Mario, I am an engineer on Google Search frontend. Thank you for posting this, and I'm really sorry and saddened to see this broken; this is certainly not intended behavior. I've reproduced the issue you described in the blog (Lynx does not allow clicking on the search results page). Even though Google serves valid HTML to Lynx, it's probably HTML that Lynx cannot parse, and since it used to work before, this is a…

Will bet good money this is due to your user-agent based content serving. I have similar issues with non-standard browsers I use. I don't know why google and google based sites (including recaptcha) are the only ones uaving this issue. It really is bad for the web to have this sort of user agent discrimination.

> It really is bad for the web to have this sort of user agent discrimination.

Eh, if the issue really was (as figured out below) that lynx doesn't support divs inside anchor tags, that seems like the best possible solution if you aren't going to drop lynx support altogether. Even IE6 allows that.

It just isn't worth trying to do progressive enhancement by tying everything into knots trying to keep the page strict html 4.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#278

Post by 8bitsrule »

AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #54
inciampati wrote: post #4

Another person notes that ddg is inferior. Maybe people get used to a certain way of searching with Google that doesn't translate to ddg. Haven't noticed a drop in quality myself and I think I might have been retrained to use different patterns and techniques in structuring my queries.

> Another person notes that ddg is inferior I'll agree with this too. Thing is, 99.XX% of the time DDG works fine. 1% of the time if I can't find a thing, I try with google and probably 50% of the time I can then find what I wanted. E.g. DDG has a 99.5% success rate, Google has a 99.75% success rate. Not too bad by DDG, as I know that last .25% is REALLY hard. Either way, google is seeing only a tiny % of my search q…

Same here: 99% of the time. If I want to dig -more specifically- than DDG wants to go in some cases, I just add a !b in front (for Bing). I do a lot of research; haven't used Gargle for 10 years.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#279

Post by OJFord »

jodrellblank wrote: post #240
gmfawcett wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the acronym for "accessibility" again?

PS C:\> 'accessibility' -replace '(? (PowerShell 7)

That's not an acronym, GP's point is that a single word acronym contains even less information than this (apparently called a 'numeronym').

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#280

Post by mar77i »

dessant wrote: post #11

The redesigned version of Google Search that is being A/B tested no longer shows links. Despite being a developer, I'm anxious to click search results, especially because when results are filtered to be from the last day or week, they are full of phishing sites and pages with scraped content that immediately redirect to malware. This change can't possibly be beneficial to users. It makes people even more ignorant abo…

I wonder if Google does proper X-testing (X as in exodus), but I guess they don't take care about a couple users leaving, as they're still busy spreading through the rest of the world. I still hope that just means the clock's ticking for the next dot-com bubble to burst so that a new generation of websites could blow up big.
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