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The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

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Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#361

Post by Leherenn »

kstrauser wrote: post #215
Leherenn wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example (outside of a niche, like a site catering specifically to some disability) of the economic argument working? Because the obvious economic counter argument is that while you work on accessibility your competitors work on features for the 90+% rest of the population. In my opinion it's why it's especially important to have regulations here, free market won't save us because in most cases the ROI…

Heh, not directly, but... Once upon a time, a younger engineer worked for a company that dealt with the DOD. The DOD wanted to upgrade their website, and as often happens, the lowest bidder was a giant company who could blacken the sky with lawyers. They worked and worked, and their deadline slipped. Finally, they made something that kind of worked, sort of, as long as the wind wasn't blowing too hard. The younger en…

That's a nice story, but it worked because of regulations and because the other website took minutes to render a page. That makes it hard to quantify whether accessibility was a significant factor in people using your site.

But thank you for taking the time to recount this story, I'm glad good prevailed over evil!

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#362

Post by einpoklum »

acdha wrote: post #358
einpoklum wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. With due respect to various useful elements of design in Microsoft's work - this booklet reads like "We design for black people! We design for LGBT people! We design for disabled people! Look at us, we're so morally and politically superior!" 2. Microsoft makes software which costs a lot of money (for most people in the world); often a lot of money. One of the main problems people with disabilities have is low inc…

It's disturbing that you find trying to be inclusive offensive because you perceive them as political opponents. I mean, who cares what people's political leanings are if they are making things better for people who haven't been well-served historically? Similarly, while Microsoft software isn't free nothing in computing is and it seems like an odd angle to criticize an effort to help make their products better based…

> nothing in computing is free...

Luckily, that is not the case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

I suggest you take a bit of time to read some Free Software philosophy. Consider starting with "Why software should be free", by Richard Stallman:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#363

Post by datagram »

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…

I think the bloat comes from a few places:

Developer productivity: Making complex pages and reusing components across pages is much easier with a library like React than with more vanilla approaches. For a lot of companies with large numbers of engineers, making sure that engineers can be productive without intimate knowledge of HTML/CSS ends up taking priority over things like performance and accessibility.

Branding/customization: The built-in HTML controls are difficult/impossible to style or customize. A lot of UI designers will design some fancy looking select dropdown, not appreciating the fact that they're forcing developers to reinvent the wheel in order to implement their design. Alternatively, there are cases where the UX for built-in controls is lacking enough that you're somewhat forced to implement a replacement (e.g. )

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#364

Post by Aeolun »

ori_b wrote: post #269
Aeolun wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on how far you are linting it? If you lint your node_packages folder you may still catch these.

When was the last time you removed a dependency due to lint errors? How about your coworkers?

If my point was to have accessible code, then I think I would care about not using components that are inaccessible.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#365

Post by kuschku »

gcblkjaidfj wrote: post #360
kuschku wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> e.g. tables still won't hold the header and first column(s) while scrolling. https://caniuse.com/css-sticky position:sticky works on tables.

It's all red :( No support anywhere but Firefox. In fact, I will now use this URL as my main argument in support of firefox! even the grand-parent, javascript infused solutions, only two out of 20 support this extremely basic and obvious use case. Web UI standards are a joke. Everyone involved only cares about rich ads and accordions/carrousels which are lame ways to shove lots of content in a badly designed space.

Why? The yellow/striped fields mean it's still supported (as long as you add it to th instead of thead/tr):

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#366

Post by acdha »

einpoklum wrote: post #362
acdha wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's disturbing that you find trying to be inclusive offensive because you perceive them as political opponents. I mean, who cares what people's political leanings are if they are making things better for people who haven't been well-served historically? Similarly, while Microsoft software isn't free nothing in computing is and it seems like an odd angle to criticize an effort to help make their products better based…

> nothing in computing is free... Luckily, that is not the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software I suggest you take a bit of time to read some Free Software philosophy. Consider starting with "Why software should be free", by Richard Stallman: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html

Haha, that lazy troll takes me right back to Slashdot before the turn of the century. On the off chance that you actually believe what you're doing is useful, here's why this form of advocacy has singularly failed to attract converts (speaking as someone who's been using and contributing to open source software since the early 1990s): open source software is only free if your time and expertise are free.

That free software has to run on non-free hardware (even if the oft-heralded RISC-V revolution happens, someone has to manufacture the device) and most people do not have the skills or time to assemble the hardware or maintain an OS. That means that we're all making tradeoffs of what things we buy and what we do ourselves, and for the vast majority of computer users, even open source developers, that involves outsourcing that work to a handful of companies (or, maybe, a hardware company and Debian). Most computer users consider that a good deal: they spend time on things they like and pay a rather small amount of money relative to the utility they get from a transformative device like a general purpose computer. This means that for most people the decisions which matter the most are made by Microsoft, Apple, or Google — and that anyone who cares should applaud them improving accessibility because it will affect daily life for billions of people.

This is especially true for accessibility, where people develop deep habits around things like screen readers and quality matters a great deal. I happen to work with a number of visually impaired users and have not heard good things about the Linux screen readers compared to their Windows or iOS counterparts, and that means that in the context of this thread it's really not useful to snark about the moral superiority of free software.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#367

Post by chrismorgan »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #315
chrismorgan wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can't prevent a downgrade attack on server side, the attacker can simply roll full HTTP on top of your server. And browsers already disallow or warn against submitting passwords over HTTP, is there a problem to fix there? Browsers disabled old versions of TLS, you don't harm anyone by supporting them (except for bit rot of that old code). There are also sites with zealous TLS settings, they support only sha384 cy…

There are multiple layers of protection against HTTPS-to-HTTP downgrade attacks.

① An HSTS policy will protect people that have visited your site within max-age seconds, typically “within the last year”.

② An HSTS policy with preload will protect everyone.

③ HTTPS-only cookies will prevent them being sent over plain HTTP.

⑤ You could depend on various newer functionality that is only available in secure contexts https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Secure...>. For example, the Web Authentication API. (This also raises a good point about using the Web Authentication API for security: authentication is tied to the origin, so http://example.com, https://example.com and https://example.com.evil.example are all different origins and no one will be able to log in over the wrong origin.)

⑥ Any JavaScript code can check the origin and rebel if it’s not what you expect—in fact, I’d say that it’s very common to do this quite incidentally. This protects against a drive-by downgrade attack, increasing the effort required by the attacker who must now reverse-engineer a bit of your code.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#368

Post by tommica »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #267
tommica wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is WoT? Does your system send a single-use code to the email, or some other method? I cant imagine a way to login to the account without some secret key, and that creates a dependency that might make the app unusable in another way on older devices.

I use a combination of cookies, fingerprinting, and web-of-trust verification (by volunteer moderators). The WoT works by building a DAG of "vouch" tags for each user. For more capable browser, client-side signing using a private key is available. There is always an accessibility-security gradient, and there are trade-offs you have to make on every side. The needs of each user are different, and many would prefer to…

Thanks for explaining, I learned something new!

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#369

Post by [deleted] »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #321
SquareWheel wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember users setting their default font sizes to 30px, then complaining when they hit the one piece of text on a website with an undefined text size. User-defined formatting hasn't worked since CSS was introduced.

Works for me much better than CSS. HN sets font size to 10pt, any user setting is better than that.

[deleted]

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#370

Post by smaudet »

moring wrote: post #299
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 r…

Shitty server code isn't an excuse for shitty frontend code though.

Moreover you are confounding apps with the web. A calculator should probably never use the network...

Pretty much every web browser can and has to open and send network packets - as long as they are small and there is not a lot of state, you are fine. You can support almost any device from 20, 30 years ago.

'Modern' JS dogpiles huge swathes of mostly unused, uncompiled code, resulting in huge network transfer costs, extreme overusage of CPU and RAM, and encourages a lot of e-waste because it mainly only works well with the latest devices...

It's arguable that this is such a bad engineering design, just to save some network packets, I wouldn't be surprised if the carbon footprint of a JS developer was at least similar to that of burning coal...

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