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The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

shkspr.mobi

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Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#281

Post by cutler »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #72
salutonmundo wrote: post #63

The worst web browser I have access to is the "experimental" one on a Kindle 4. Most web pages that one might want to visit will not load in this web browser—because it does not support modern versions of TLS. For the reasons mentioned in this article—it's probably a good idea to keep plain HTTP access available on your websites.

This, a thousand times. No one is going to mitm someone browsing my text blog. On the other hand, https creates many barriers to access, including recent version requirement, time sync, and extra cpu and bandwidth.

Not to mention single points of failure like Letsencrypt.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#282

Post by cutler »

tabtab wrote: post #156

Warren Buffett said one of his greatest assets is the ability to "no" without fear of social pressure and retribution. Too many bosses and customers want fancy eye-candy without knowing and/or caring about the carrying cost of this bloat. Staff feels obliged to make them happy. All primates love "shiny red things", even humans, even if it's not rational. K.I.S.S. is dead in IT. Fads and toys won.

Toys won in more ways than one. Most content consumers now use apps more than websites so all this won't matter in a decade or two when the open internet will be some anachronism which lives outside the prevailing handful of walled gardens.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#283

Post by aksss »

jcranmer wrote: post #80
cptskippy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-profits don't necessarily sell anything but they've been sued by the ADA for violating the laws on accessibility.

"Sell anything" is probably a bit too restrictive, but summarizing case law on what counts as "affecting commerce" is difficult. In general, you need something that looks like a service or good being provided (even if no money is actually paid for it). Something like Youtube would absolutely fall under the ADA--it's clearly analogous to a movie theater.

Let’s just be honest - anyone can sue anybody, but you’re probably not going to have problems under the ADA unless you become visible for some reason (success, expressing the wrong thoughts loudly, service necessity for a community, etc).

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#284

Post by analog31 »

ogre_codes wrote: post #10

This is a fantastic article, it does miss one very key point about bog-standard HTML which is worth mentioning though. The standard widgets are all accessible, people with screen readers, limited mobility, poor vision, etc, all rely on pages being written so the devices they use to read the web can function properly. People who choose to eschew these standard components very frequently end up with a site which is unu…

I remember learning about HTML for the first time, maybe in Byte Magazine. It was before I actually had a computer with a browser. But the article talked about a benefit of HTML, which was that the tags could be interpreted by custom browsers for accessibility, including for the blind or sight-impaired. It seemed like a pretty cool idea to me.

Later on, when people started treating web design as a general purpose graphical and GUI framework, many of the accessibility benefits probably vanished.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#285

Post by analog31 »

lastofthemojito wrote: post #114
ogre_codes wrote: post #10

This is a fantastic article, it does miss one very key point about bog-standard HTML which is worth mentioning though. The standard widgets are all accessible, people with screen readers, limited mobility, poor vision, etc, all rely on pages being written so the devices they use to read the web can function properly. People who choose to eschew these standard components very frequently end up with a site which is unu…

One of the great things about accessibility is that it often doesn't just benefit people with disabilities. My wife and I have watched a lot of TV in the past year with the volume down and captioning on, while we enjoy some down time while our baby is sleeping. A ramped entrance to a building allows wheelchair-bound folks access, but it also helps able-bodied people using delivery dollies. Making simple, lightweight…

Indeed, I'm a double bassist, and accessible buildings are a huge blessing, especially when loading out at 2 AM after playing for 4 hours straight. Not to mention, they've probably saved me thousands of dollars in repairs.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#286

Post by trissylegs »

ogre_codes wrote: post #10

This is a fantastic article, it does miss one very key point about bog-standard HTML which is worth mentioning though. The standard widgets are all accessible, people with screen readers, limited mobility, poor vision, etc, all rely on pages being written so the devices they use to read the web can function properly. People who choose to eschew these standard components very frequently end up with a site which is unu…

> Very few people have the skill to turn a div into an effective button, yet over and over I see web sites with rows of buttons which are in fact just divs with javascript behind them.

Gahhh. I use either an or a and put style on it. Has all the same visual appeal of the equivalent div. But it already is a button.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#288

Post by moonchild »

petepete wrote: post #219
anderspitman wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I started going this direction and ended up taking one step back and settling on Markdown. The reason was I realized an HTML renderer is still a pretty heavy dependency to consume my content. The upshot is you can now browse my blog with curl or netcat: curl https://apitman.com/txt/feed nc apitman.com 2052 I may switch to another format in the future. It doesn't matter much as long as it's readable as plain tex…

I tend to write in Slim, it does an excellent job of removing most of the tag noise from HTML while giving you more flexibility than Markdown. https://slim-lang.com

Slim doesn't look particularly interesting for majority-plaintext applications.

It doesn't let you add nodes inline, so things like emphasis or links become much more verbose.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#289

Post by moonchild »

simias wrote: post #187
chrismorgan wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox exposes this stuff just fine: its context menu on videos has “View Video”, “Copy Video Location” and “Save Video As…”. (I thought that Chrome did too, but maybe my memory is faulty or maybe they removed it at some point.) But sites can easily prevent all of this stuff from happening by putting something transparent on top of the video, so that you’re not actually right clicking on the video, but on another el…

> Firefox exposes this stuff just fine: its context menu on videos has “View Video”, “Copy Video Location” and “Save Video As…”. (I thought that Chrome did too, but maybe my memory is faulty or maybe they removed it at some point.) You're right, I never noticed that. Although I just tried on youtube and the option are there... but greyed out. Not sure why. As for the various formats, if the web wasn't a javascript sh…

> greyed out. Not sure why.

DRM, maybe?

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#290

Post by pvorb »

scrollaway wrote: post #239
pvorb wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree with all of your points. I just wanted to point out the irony that the manual and other documentation for this "inclusive design" toolkit come as PDFs – the worst choice you can make if you strive for accessibility.

PDFs can be accessible, and many of them are! Everyone who works with PDF needs to know about PDF/A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A PDF/A is a small family of sub-formats to PDFs which amount to the accessible subset of PDF + some requirements. PDF/A and PDF/UA are mandated by a variety of governments for PDF distribution. They're very suitable to archival and are accessible (screenreaders can work with them, th…

That might be true, but these ones are not. I can't efficiently read them on my smartphone and have to scroll around a lot. They also show two pages on one, probably to be better printable for some marketing material, but I would never want to print a PDF that's mostly black, because that would overwhelm my printer. I'm also not near a printer right now. This is clearly inaccessible to me.

HTML, on the other side, can be easily made readable on any device. Even if the author didn't care, through readable mode in my browser.

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