I'm betting on HTML • Hacker News Board

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#381

Post by miki123211 » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 5:49 PM UTC

zagrebian wrote: post #355

jerf wrote: post #332

Article's first sentence: "With the advent of large language model-based artificial intelligence, semantic HTML is more important now than ever." I think the sentence "With the advent of large language model-based artificial intelligence, semantic HTML is less important now than ever." is far more defensible. The semantic web has failed and what replaced it was Google spending a crap ton of money writing a variety of…

Are you suggesting that AI will solve web accessibility, which is based on semantic HTML and ARIA? Because if not, humans will still be required to ensure that web content is accessible, and in that case semantic HTML remains important.

This has been tried and doesn't work, which doesn't mean it will never work in the future! There are a few companies offering solutions in this space, but they don't work, are often worse than the problems they're trying to solve and are a privacy disaster. The companies peddling them often engage in shady business practices, like falsely claiming that their overlays can protect you from ADA lawsuits[1], while actually suing the people who expose their lies[2]. Most accessibility practitioners and disabled users themselves are warning the public to avoid those tools[3].

[1] https://adrianroselli.com/2020/06/accessibe-will-get-you-sue... [2] https://adrianroselli.com/2023/05/audioeye-is-suing-me.html [3] https://overlayfactsheet.com

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#382

Post by Freedom2 » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 5:50 PM UTC

treis wrote: post #272

berkes wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This anecdote was a "pixel perfect" HTML version of some figma design. I did some CSS tricks to style the ` ` and was lucky the designer was lazy and never specified the styles of all the dialogs around date/time pickers (they weren't that important anyway). You can style a lot of these native elements. And where you cannot, I'd argue that's actually good. I've worked with designers who insisted that everything looke…

>You can style a lot of these native elements. And where you cannot, I'd argue that's actually good. I've worked with designers who insisted that everything looked and feeled the way they had designed it. But I've also worked with designers who, when showed how the date-picker looked on IOS, OSX and even Gnome, were incredibly happy that finally there was design that just followed what the users were used to. The nat…

> The native browser date picker is very limited. You can't do basic things like disable weekends or select a range making it unsuitable for a wide swath of usecases.

I think that you'd have to reevaluate your users and your use case then. As someone, like berkes, who builds sites almost entirely with HTML / CSS, it's often the case that the developer is RIGHT over what the user needs. After speaking to many clients about the limitations of native HTML elements, I've successfully convinced users to change negative browsing patterns.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#383

Post by mxuribe » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 5:51 PM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #287

sourcecodeplz wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't use CSS just to make pages pretty. It is useful for accessibility and user experience as well. Not to mention personalization. Not every page needs to have a carbon copy style of others. CSS is so useful it is almost ridiculous to say HTML never needed it.

> CSS is so useful it is almost ridiculous to say HTML never needed it I didn't mean CSS is useless, I meant it is not necessary for every website to define their own CSS to look nice and not ugly. The problem is almost no ordinary user knows they can define their own defaults (fonts, background - in browser settings, more complex - in user CSS).

Long, long ago, when i first learned that i could define my own (css) defaults on my browser, my mind was blown! I can't recall if it was back in netscape navigator or early fireforx days...but learning the command path from the menu to "turn off css styles" (View -> Page Style -> No style) made me feel like some sort of superpowered being! lol :-D More seriously, it actually helped me better understand the web, html, web pages as documents "downloaded" by the browser, etc. I became a much better web dev for it - beyond feeling like i had more freedom due to software/app.!

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#384

Post by intrasight » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 5:53 PM UTC

maxfurman wrote: post #292

I've been doing web development full-time for nearly a decade now, and I didn't know about all of these. I think I failed a job interview last month because I didn't know about . Sigh.

I've been doing web dev for over 20 years and just discovered and used datalist

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#385

Post by Freedom2 » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 5:55 PM UTC

klabb3 wrote: post #37

jamamp wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might like this: http://youmightnotneedjs.com/

Hahaha wow I have to say that was the least convincing demo I’ve seen. - Fills history with massive amounts of entries, and back button doesn’t do anything - Slider UI look like crap (ok fine, can be fixed) but use not just css but SCSS (requires a precompiler) but wait, not enough, it also needs hardcoded number of images. It’s not reusable in the most basic sense. - Input validation has phone number on xxxx-xxx-… f…

I disagree. I've built entire sites that rival the most popular SPA's today with HTML / CSS and a tiny bit of JS, and I've had less issues with those than other sites at my agency built with a JS framework. User reports often come in telling me "Wow, this site is so good! I'm really glad you took on this project".

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#386

Post by ovao » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

aaviator42 wrote: post #221

SPBS wrote: post #165

ugh I was so excited to see pure HTML modals were a thing with only to find out there's no way of triggering them without JavaScript. Using pure HTML you can only dismiss them, not trigger them. https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/3567 > dialog elements are a great addition and I'm glad they're getting implemented, but a key part of their functionality relies on JavaScript: to open a you need to use JavaScript to s…

You can implement modals without JS, with HTML and CSS. For an example, click on '?' in the top right corner here: https://aavi.xyz/proj/colors/

There are useful tricks to changing CSS properties via checkbox state and pseudo-selectors to implement simple modals (which won’t be accessible), but you can’t open a modal element without JS.

Weirdly, you can close them with a form submission, but you can’t open them with one.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#387

Post by gyudin » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

In a world where pages takes x10 more time to load than to render some hyperrealistic scenes in AAA games on some Unreal Engine 5 with 140 fps? Yup, I’m betting too on a front-end stacks that change every 6-12 months but only lead to more and more poorly optimized websites. Half of the times even mobile apps are useless, when they can’t download a freaking JSON response in areas with poor network coverage.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#388

Post by sublinear » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 6:28 PM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #366

sublinear wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds regressive and the battle has been over for almost a decade now. Server-side rendering is silly and client-side rendering should not be used for the entire page. Even for complex web apps, the majority of the HTML is static. The best web experiences are static HTML with client-side rendering only used for the dynamic sections of the page. It's not even a choice to do it any other way anymore if you care a…

> This sounds regressive and the battle has been over for almost a decade now This sounds like what google would like for everyone on HN to believe. Using "a11y" and "SEO" to push bad technology abstractions is tantamount to petty bullying in my view. Genuinely, I don't understand the position that SSR somehow makes accessibility worse . Can you walk me through how adding more javascript on top somehow solves the pro…

> Can you walk me through how adding more javascript on top somehow solves the problem of making a website compatible with a screen reader?

I didn't say to add javascript to make the page more accessible. I said that a static HTML page is most accessible and should be strongly preferred over any dynamic content regardless of how it's rendered. Screen readers can misannounce dynamic elements and leave the user confused about the state of the page.

But when dynamic elements do need to be reannounced due to an event, refreshing the page would be a terrible experience since the screen reader loses focus and starts back from the top of the page. Aria alerts also require javascript. It makes perfect sense that if you're pushing out an aria alert with js already that all that rendering logic should also go on the client side.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...

As for SEO, I'm specifically talking about good metadata in the head tag, a static page that's comprehensible, and a sitemap. Static pages are better than SSR for this because SSR doesn't always respond with the same page for the same URL.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#389

Post by 7373737373 » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 6:34 PM UTC

A while ago there was this VR program called JanusVR where rooms were specified using custom HTML tags (https://janusxr.org/docs/build/introtojml/index.html)

Links are represented as portals, and unlike in VRChat you can just walk straight through them like in the Portal games - allowing one to "walk through the web": https://youtu.be/jYQtAcQddRg?t=48

Now, language models can generate HTML, and I feel this may be an opportunity to revive it again. To generate VRChat rooms, you have to learn Unity, which is heavy and has a steep learning curve. But if you can go from a text description to HTML, then you just need a text file!

It's a great alternative to the walled gardens

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#390

Post by klardotsh » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 6:39 PM UTC

johnnyworker wrote: post #237

klardotsh wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately this is a case where we'll have to agree to disagree. Half the time with Electron apps I wish I could disable CSS completely and just use my system theme because it sucks less than whatever the designer came up with for that app (the definition of "sucks less" falls into many axes that vary per application and context; no point in digressing far into that), so what you described would be a feature, not…

Some like Magic User Interface for the Amiga, but across Operating Systems, and which provides the resulting stylesheet to the browser (with no ability for sites to override it unless I allow it) would be my dream and a marketers nightmare. Just information and media, displayed how each person prefers them to be displayed (and obviously with a lot of user made themes for people to browse and try out). With sub-config…

Unfortunately, the marketing and branding departments would all have aneurysms over this, but I do love and share your dream.