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I'm betting on HTML

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Re: I'm betting on HTML

#411

Post by coldtea »

zagrebian wrote: post #372
jakubmazanec wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM could transform "bad HTML" into good HTML; add ARIA tags, add image captions, etc.

Unless it’s 100% reliable or near 100% reliable, you’d still need manual testing. Right now, automatic accessibility testing can’t even detect most accessibility issues. So we haven’t even reached the stage where all issues are detected by tools, and probably never will. Fixing all issues automatically is significantly harder than detecting them.

>Unless it’s 100% reliable or near 100% reliable, you’d still need manual testing.

Not unless:

(a) it's X% reliable now, and it would be Y% (b) businesses actually care for increased reliability, and not just for passing the accessibility requirements.

Most businesses could not give less f...., and don't do "manual testing" today either. Just add the token required tags. That's true even when they do business with the government (which mandates this even more highly).

LLM-driven accessibility info would be an improvement.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#413

Post by lmm »

cratermoon wrote: post #402
lmm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't. Like, that linked document is a cool idea but it's utterly inaccurate as a description of how the tags are used by actually existing website or handled by actually existing user agents (yes, including screenreaders).

Perhaps the tags have not been de facto treated semantically by existing practices. There’s a great deal wrong with the tag soup pervading the web. Current convention doesn’t mean they can’t have semantics.

Potentially they could have semantics in the future, but right now they don't. If you make a user agent that relies on them having those semantics, that user agent will misinterpret a lot of web pages.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#414

Post by krainboltgreene »

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…

> The semantic web has failed

literally by no metric is this true other than tech bros saying it on HN. The entire internet is powered by websites using semantic markup and clients querying it.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#415

Post by moritzwarhier »

coldtea wrote: post #408
moritzwarhier wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The semantic web has failed and what replaced it was Google spending a crap ton of money Aren't schema.org and Wikidata/Wikipedia still powering most of Google's rich search results? I heard them announce the new result page with bard but I probably didn't see it because of ad-blindness or it's not yet releases in my location, have to look this up...

> Aren't schema.org and Wikidata/Wikipedia still powering most of Google's rich search results? Were they ever?

Well schema.org was not referring to an organization or entitity, but its published schemas. I'd argue these were and are driving a lot of rich results, especially for local businesses.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#416

Post by krainboltgreene »

coldtea wrote: post #408
moritzwarhier wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The semantic web has failed and what replaced it was Google spending a crap ton of money Aren't schema.org and Wikidata/Wikipedia still powering most of Google's rich search results? I heard them announce the new result page with bard but I probably didn't see it because of ad-blindness or it's not yet releases in my location, have to look this up...

> Aren't schema.org and Wikidata/Wikipedia still powering most of Google's rich search results? Were they ever?

Yes.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#417

Post by krainboltgreene »

merdaverse wrote: post #222

The problem I see with sematic web is that no matter how easy it gets, developers refuse to use it properly. I have been looking closely at the tag since a browser extension of mine uses it, and although it is extremely clear what it should do in the MDN documentation (the documentation itself is a good example usage of , etc.), very little sites use it properly. Even the fancy professional sites wrap all the page co…

> developers refuse to use it properly

literally every developer who has ever used a `

` tag for paragraph has used it properly. An `class="card"`. A ``.

How are so many tech literate people in this thread bemoaning the "uselessness" or "failure" of semantic web? It's like if you told me "Man I wish motorvehicles were successful, it'd sure be nice to travel long distances!"

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#418

Post by billforsternz »

simonw wrote: post #23
billforsternz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The misspelling of grammer instead of grammar is a little ironic in this context. Sorry:-)

That was deliberate - if you view the source: ... then GPT-4 fixed my grammer and spelling

That's a little bit embarrassing for me then. Although as an intentional joke it's at least a little bit lame, so I'll live with the embarrassment.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#419

Post by mmahemoff »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #310
mmahemoff wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s one of the main benefits, but if the machine can make sense of the content, it can still present it however is clearest for the user.

But explicit, human-verified metadata is always going to beat inferred, fuzzily-extracted data, surely?

Maybe in some cases, but that requires time and expertise. It may not be worth it in many cases.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#420

Post by dimmke »

chrismorgan wrote: post #326
dimmke wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CSS3 and HTML5 are not meaningful semantic version numbers anymore and haven’t been for over a decade. Both CSS and HTML are considered “living standards” now and no longer use version numbers: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/introduction.html#is-... ? Nesting in CSS became broadly supported in Chromium and other evergreen browsers a few months ago. This is a feature that developers have had to use inside of s…

> Nesting in CSS became broadly supported in Chromium and other evergreen browsers a few months ago. Firefox hasn’t shipped it yet. https://caniuse.com/css-nesting shows it landing in 117 next month. > Even now, it’s not supported by older versions of iOS/mobile Safari which could easily be 15-20% of a large US based websites’ traffic. Yeah, actual global support is probably still below ⅔—caniuse.com is showing globa…

Thanks, that analysis was worth adding. You're saying 2 years, I've heard other people say they would maybe consider relying on this in 5. It's really dependent on the software you work on.

So an estimate of around 20 years from the time people started using things like variables and nesting to improve writing CSS to being able to actually write real CSS using those features and actually being able to count on broad browser support.

Then I think about things like JavaScript modules, and how completely fucked up that entire ecosystem is for so many reasons.

And then condescending comments in the parent like "I think they just don't understand what can be done with just HTML/CSS these days, they're so used to complexity" - people who have clearly never worked in front-end development as their day job. It's insulting and reductive.

I am glad that this stuff made it into the spec, and I know that over the next 5 years, things like native CSS variables and nesting will become more common until Sass/PostCSS is scarce, but they will probably still be being used inside of abstractions like SPA frameworks. And all of the JavaScript will unfortunately probably be written in TypeScript.

To me, the holy grail end game of front-end development is the elimination of a build step. And for that to happen before I hit retirement we have to find some way of decreasing the lead time of innovation -> spec implementation -> browser support from 20 years to < 5 years. Obviously, browsers becoming evergreen and Internet Explorer finally dying will help. Already, simpler tooling is becoming more prominent than the dark days of Webpack. But there's still a long, long way to go. This is all assuming Google doesn't finally figure out a way to destroy the open web all together before this happens.

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