The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML • Hacker News Board

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#291

Post by outsomnia » Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 5:49 AM UTC

chrismorgan wrote: post #95

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.

The trouble is that you can’t support HTTP without completely undermining HTTPS. If you support HTTP at all , you’re damaging the experience for the almost everyone that could have used HTTPS: almost no one will get the HTTPS version unless you deliberately push them over to it, which you will only be able to do after page load by some JavaScript-based user-agent or feature-based sniffing, so now the page loads and t…

HSTS

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#292

Post by ehnto » Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 5:55 AM UTC

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…

I use a tool called Vimium so I don't need my mouse to navigate websites, and it really quickly highlights websites that have accessibility problems. Even before this though, my preference was websites that use standard elements, as so frequently people can't write robust code and boutique buttons, drop downs or other widgets break.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#293

Post by DCoder » Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 5:59 AM UTC

trissylegs wrote: post #286

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.

> use either an or a

Generally, it should be noted that an tag is only appropriate if it makes sense to right-click this element and get options to "open in new tab" or "add to bookmarks". All the stupid "buttons" implemented as + e.preventDefault() need to die.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#294

Post by DCoder » Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 6:35 AM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #284

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 gra…

Yeah, nowadays most of the sites are suffering from div-ititis that has no semantics, massive blackholes of JavaScript that have to be loaded and processed before you can even see plain text, and CSS class names that are randomly hashed with each deployment in the name of modularity.

General accessibility be damned.

fallback messages be damned. (Except when snitching on your page views to Google Analytics, that's too important to be neglected! I wonder if GA has any default marker to let their customers distinguish these views from normal ones, or if that's still left to each customer to implement manually.)

UI customizations in the form of browser extensions and styles be damned.

Ad blocking be damned.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#295

Post by b0rsuk » Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 6:35 AM UTC

ziftface wrote: post #117

apabepa wrote: post #19

I am not a front-end developer but looking at it from a distance I really don't get modern web design. Sure some sites might need fancy javascript single page features, like if your webpage is an interactive map or realtime game, but most sites are just text and some pictures. Whats with all the javascript? Your site looks just like the next one anyway! It feels like an "Emperor's New Clothes" situation or maybe more…

The fact is, the Javascript ecosystem is unmatched when it comes to very quickly creating frontend applications. Maybe another set of tools would have been better, but that doesn't really matter. This set of tools is what everyone uses, and a lot of effort and creativity goes into making js frontend development as smooth and fast as possible. I often need to very quickly make internal services at my job and while I l…

Javascript is as privileged as programming languages get. It's welded into all web browsers except perhaps Lynx. To get traction, an alternative language would need to be simultaneously included in several browsers. Good luck with that.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#296

Post by b0rsuk » Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 6:39 AM UTC

michaelpb wrote: post #264

scrollaway wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Django's user system is .. limited. You need a bunch of third party libraries to add very commonly used things such as auth APIs, oauth, 2fa, etc. I've worked with Django for over a decade and i dislike it more and more. It hasn't evolved to match the environment around it and how to best use it. Typing is missing. Something like FastAPI is very promising but Django's admin is still superb for prototyping and its orm…

Agreed, it definitely is limited. Also the admin panel is limited too, and although it's very extendable, the admin extension API is kind of clunky and inconsistent at times. Yeah FastAPI looks great! I've used Sanic in the past and FastAPI seems cool for some of the same reasons. I'm also following closely Django Hotwire - https://hotwire.dev/ I only brought up Django in a narrow context to challenge an assumption m…

Last time I hanged around #django, they said admin pages are for prototyping and technical admins only. Admin is not meant to be extensible. For true power without issues, you should roll your own CRUD views. Django has features which make it easier, such as viewsets.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#297

Post by sundarurfriend » Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 6:50 AM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #87

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.

Eh, 98.24% of all users worldwide can use TLS 1.2: https://caniuse.com/?search=tls%201.2 I'm not willing to make security exceptions to support devices from 2011. "HTTPS by default" lifts all boats: people who would MITM your users can't tell if they're reading your nice blog or a critique of their local government, and that's a good thing.

> Eh, 98.24% of all users worldwide can use TLS 1.2: https://caniuse.com/?search=tls%201.2

That's 98.24% of users captured by CanIUse's sources (which seems to be StatCounter). Like most things on the Internet, that's a bubble - the bubble of users who visit statcounter-infested websites, and are able to run their scripts. And the point of the original post is to think outside the bubble. Not in all cases - if you're a B2B service, or selling T-shirts with slogans on them, CanIUse is likely a good enough source to base your choices on. But if you're a government website, or providing critical Covid-19 data for example, it's irresponsible to ignore these long-tail of users who fall outside expected and easily visible patterns. There's a spectrum between these two kinds of websites, and it's worth thinking about where you fall on that and how many you're comfortable with denying access to your website.

It's a tradeoff between security and accessibility, and we should at least be thoughtful about the implications of our decisions.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#298

Post by moring » Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 7:10 AM UTC

grishka wrote: post #76

kodt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps because buttons have some default styles attached and people just decided to use a div.

That's what a CSS reset is for.

HTML buttons have special behaviour in CSS (not even styles, but differences in the rules how they work) that cannot be reset using a CSS reset. I actually tried to make a button fit into the reset of the UI until I gave up and used a div.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#299

Post by moring » Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 7:30 AM UTC

apabepa wrote: post #19

I am not a front-end developer but looking at it from a distance I really don't get modern web design. Sure some sites might need fancy javascript single page features, like if your webpage is an interactive map or realtime game, but most sites are just text and some pictures. Whats with all the javascript? Your site looks just like the next one anyway! It feels like an "Emperor's New Clothes" situation or maybe more…

> Whats with all the javascript

What's with all the server round-trips? If you have a UI that takes user input and just reacts to it, without any data needed from the server -- why should it go on a full round-trip just to get a new UI element that it could create locally just as well?

Look at other things on your computer: a text editor, or a calculator. Would you expect every interaction to send a request to some remote server just for the sake of it?

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#300

Post by deergomoo » Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 8:16 AM UTC

pier25 wrote: post #256

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…

It would be great if browsers implemented other common elements such as sortable data tables, carousels, etc. https://open-ui.org/

This is the issue. People (especially on HN) complain about people building un-semantic, inaccessible websites that don't work with JS disabled—and I agree this sucks—but HTML is so limited your only choice is to build the niceties yourself or skip them altogether. Sure, in some circumstances you can progressively enhance (sortable table for example), but many cases having a HTML fallback that still does what you need it to is a ton of extra work.

HTML covers text, painfully basic tables, semantic rectangles (, , etc.), form inputs, and embedded media. Basically, anything you could build with a word processor. Outside of that, you're on your own.

JavaScript and CSS are continually improving and are so much more capable than they were even five years ago, but it feels like HTML is just stagnating. Why can't we have new elements every year, with behaviour? Stuff that works just fine out of the box, but can be easily tweaked with CSS or a little sprinkling of JS. The amount of developer time and bandwidth we could save not having to re-invent the wheel for every little thing.