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HTML attributes for improved accessibility and user experience

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Re: HTML attributes for improved accessibility and user experience

#11
And html table layout are not harmful, actually 2D semantic HTML documents can do wonders as they can be reasonably displayed with a hardcoded css beyond good enough.

The only thing missing is how to display the table rules, but from a semantic point of view. Namely, I would kind of un-obsolete the table BORDER attribute, as it gives the information that seeing the rules is somewhat important. Or maybe an attribute being more explicit than it is a semantic value, meaning rules are sufficiently important, for instance a rule level, that a css or a hardcoded css (could still be dynamically configured) would choose to display or not. For instance, like a WEIGHT attribute with NORMAL(default) and STRONG value, or directly a STRONG attribute, even though un-obsoleting BORDER changing the definition of its value being a scale of it strenght (0, rules would not be displayed, not 0 rules would displayed in hardcoded css) would fairly enough.

https://webaim.org/techniques/tables/

(I am not talking about the abomination of the semantic web from a decade ago)

Re: HTML attributes for improved accessibility and user experience

#12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't improve my life, at all. When I have questions about a concept and I use the english word for it (because I never learned CS in French and would not understand the French page), the first Wikipedia page will still be in French, because of those shitty tags. Honestly, those are only useful if the words are the same in multiple languages. As for me, this recent changes get on my nerves, and are one reason wh…

Is it because of those tags? Or is it just because Google on its own has done a comprehensive job of indexing and incorrectly thought you wanted the French version?

There's just no way to convince Google to use English-only when I'm in another country other than using a VPN.

I changed the settings multiple times, disabled the auto-detect language, but it always leaks in on suggestions or results.

Just like there's no way to make Youtube disable autoplay of videos. One week later or so, it reverts back to its default behavior.

Or for Google to respect that the account I'm using right now is the one I want to use instead of the first one I logged in many days ago.

Re: HTML attributes for improved accessibility and user experience

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it because of those tags? Or is it just because Google on its own has done a comprehensive job of indexing and incorrectly thought you wanted the French version?

There's just no way to convince Google to use English-only when I'm in another country other than using a VPN. I changed the settings multiple times, disabled the auto-detect language, but it always leaks in on suggestions or results. Just like there's no way to make Youtube disable autoplay of videos. One week later or so, it reverts back to its default behavior. Or for Google to respect that the account I'm using r…

I mean look I have to sympathise with Google here. They've no doubt had the entire combined wisdom of Google looking at this problem and clearly there is just no way for human beings to comprehend what the `Accept-Language` header does.

/s because, you know.

Re: HTML attributes for improved accessibility and user experience

#14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's just no way to convince Google to use English-only when I'm in another country other than using a VPN. I changed the settings multiple times, disabled the auto-detect language, but it always leaks in on suggestions or results. Just like there's no way to make Youtube disable autoplay of videos. One week later or so, it reverts back to its default behavior. Or for Google to respect that the account I'm using r…

I mean look I have to sympathise with Google here. They've no doubt had the entire combined wisdom of Google looking at this problem and clearly there is just no way for human beings to comprehend what the `Accept-Language` header does. /s because, you know.

Maybe if we ever reach AGI I can ask it kindly to respect my checkboxes.

Re: HTML attributes for improved accessibility and user experience

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's just no way to convince Google to use English-only when I'm in another country other than using a VPN. I changed the settings multiple times, disabled the auto-detect language, but it always leaks in on suggestions or results. Just like there's no way to make Youtube disable autoplay of videos. One week later or so, it reverts back to its default behavior. Or for Google to respect that the account I'm using r…

I mean look I have to sympathise with Google here. They've no doubt had the entire combined wisdom of Google looking at this problem and clearly there is just no way for human beings to comprehend what the `Accept-Language` header does. /s because, you know.

It's absurd how they keep finding new ways to make this worse. They have ignored `Accept-Language: en` for a long time but used to at least have a link to switch to the english version. Then that link stopped appearing on search result pages and now it doesn't even consistently show up on the home page. Now it seems they don't even fully respect the account language wile logged in. WTF.

While on vacation google decided to switch me to chinese even though I was logged in with an account that was set to english for decades on a browser that didn't change. The only way to change that back is to go to your account settings, and all the links leading there are ... in chinese. Even once back home this language change persisted. At no point did Google ever get an `Accept-Language: zh*` from me or any other indication that I wanted to switch languages besides the IP I'm connecting from which means fuck all.

Re: HTML attributes for improved accessibility and user experience

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it because of those tags? Or is it just because Google on its own has done a comprehensive job of indexing and incorrectly thought you wanted the French version?

There's just no way to convince Google to use English-only when I'm in another country other than using a VPN. I changed the settings multiple times, disabled the auto-detect language, but it always leaks in on suggestions or results. Just like there's no way to make Youtube disable autoplay of videos. One week later or so, it reverts back to its default behavior. Or for Google to respect that the account I'm using r…

You don’t even need to travel - I’ve seen Google decide at different times that I should be getting Polish, French, or Portuguese, instead of English from my desktop in London.

Re: HTML attributes for improved accessibility and user experience

#18

> The reversed attribute is used to reverse ordered lists ( ) in the opposite order. Holy shit that’s been a thing for ten years and I didn’t know about it??

How does this help accessibility, though? (Maybe I don't know enough about HTML. Is the usual way to produce a descending enumeration to write the elements in reverse order and then re-reverse them in CSS or so, which makes them be read wrong by screen readers?)

Re: HTML attributes for improved accessibility and user experience

#19
re: the autocomplete attribute.

It would have been nice to include a brief explanation of all the ways this feature is likely to break what you expect.

For example, recent versions of Chrome will autocomplete against a table of values across all domains for the given field "name" attribute, regardless of what you put into the autocomplete attribute [0].

I suppose this would be a fine decision if all form fields in all forms represented a global, singular datum (i.e., My Account), but it is not fine at all when dealing with collections of things (i.e., Cars, Parts or whatever).

I managed to recently work around this by generating unique-ish ids for name fields and autocomplete attributes, then fixing them before submission.

I'm obviously still salty.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12374442/chrome-ignores-...

Re: HTML attributes for improved accessibility and user experience

#20
post #9

How does hreflang improve accessibility and user experience? The article says "You can improve the user experience" with it, but never actually demonstrates that. It then starts talking about some SEO stuff, but it's still not super clear what it actually does?

It doesn't improve my life, at all. When I have questions about a concept and I use the english word for it (because I never learned CS in French and would not understand the French page), the first Wikipedia page will still be in French, because of those shitty tags. Honestly, those are only useful if the words are the same in multiple languages. As for me, this recent changes get on my nerves, and are one reason wh…

Ha, I once had the exact opposite problem. I studied part of my CS degree in France, in French, but for some reason when I went to sit the exam, they thought I would like to have the exam in English. I freaked out - I didn't know any of the terms in English, only in French. Fortunately they had a spare copy in French for me to work from.
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