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Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

tomdale.net

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Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#131

Post by mistercow »

Are there good tools out there for helping to ensure that a JavaScript web app without progressive enhancement is accessible to the disabled (e.g. screen readers can parse it, speech recognition software can interact with it).

I ask because I've recently discovered that Google has massively failed in this department with some of their products, at least as far as speech recognition is concerned. Google Docs is a great example of what I'm talking about. If you try to use it with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, buttons and menu items are often not recognized, text entry is only reliable by using the separate (and inconvenient) Dragon "dictation box", editing is a nightmare, and review comments can only be placed by actually copying from a separate program. Your best bet if you need to collaborate is honestly to just use Microsoft Word, and then either upload and convert, or copy and paste, and then accept the fact that a lot of collaboration tools won't be usable by you or any of your collaborators.

I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to try to use modern web apps as someone who can't type effectively or read a screen, and it seems like the problem is only going to get worse as people rely more on canvas without taking accessibility into consideration.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#132

Post by ylesaout »

repsilat wrote: post #125
slig wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like other search engines can't step up their game and build the same functionality.

The problem is that now everyone who wants to build a decent crawler/scraper has to do it as well. Used to be any kid in his parents' basement could put wget and sed together and explore the internet. Now Timmy has to bolt a whole damn browser runtime onto his script to make sure he's getting the content text from blog posts and twitter feeds. Asking Timmy to "step up his game" is heartless, and it'd be unnecessary i…

Maybe Timmy should just have a look at the Google specification! And he would see that he could continue to crawl the web with his favorite tool! He has just to replace #! with an _escaped_fragment_ query parameter, that's not so heartless ;)

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#133

Post by dredmorbius »

mmastrac wrote: post #13
Pinckney wrote: post #3

I think the point that's overlooked here is that the offenders aren't the clever apps that would be impossible to write without javascript. Go ahead and write those. I'm happy for you, really. The problem is pages that require javascript to display static content. There are very few good reasons for an article, or an image gallery, or a homepage that could have been displayed just fine a decade ago to now need javasc…

What, exactly, is the issue with writing a simple content site that requires JS? If you aren't pulling in half a MB of JS, but it does require scripting to function, I don't see the problem. Just because I could spend the effort to be progressive doesn't constrain me to have to do it. It doesn't make me a lazy programmer either: just pragmatic. 99.99% of the people visiting my site have JS enabled and I'm happy to su…

Search-engine optimization is a large part.

The fact that the JS frequently results in lower usability is biggest on my list. I've encountered Blogger themes which are so fucking piss-poor I literally cannot read them, even with JS enabled.

If the primary goal of your site is content, stick with vanilla HTML. You're vastly better off for it.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#134

Post by mariusz79 »

EGreg wrote: post #12

Javascript is great for making more efficient sites. Here's why: 1) Static resources can be cached on a CDN and composited on the client instead of an overloaded app server 2) You can load data instead of heavy and repetitive HTML over the wire 3) You can cache the data in the client and re-use it later, making for snappier interfaces That said, you have to watch out for URLs. Just because you can write everything wi…

1 has been possible since the beginning of time. Every modern browser as cache built-in.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#135

Post by andybak »

A great javascript app is wonderful thing but if you fail, you tend to fail hard.

A HTML/CSS page + progressive enhancement tends to involve much less shooting-oneself-in-the-foot.

If you've got the talent, time and budget to do it well (note that is 'AND' not 'OR'. Gawker being a case of 2 out of 3 not being enough) then please go ahead.

However - if you have any doubts about your ability to see the whole thing through to perfection then a half-assed website is much less awful for your audience than a half-assed app.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#136

Post by mynameisme »

sgdesign wrote: post #106
mynameisme wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this something people even want in content driven sites though? Imagine reddit in real time, it would be a mess and impossible to keep track of what you last read.

You can try out for yourself :) http://telesc.pe

I have, and it works ok when there is a ton of concurrent users. But on the other hand, I don't think the UX of telescope is any better than reddit's and in some ways worse (example: clicking on a post with a large amount of comments cause the page to pause without any visual feedback. This could be fixed, but is any better than just a regular link?)

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#137

Post by TheZenPsycho »

tomdale wrote: post #42
padolsey wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could work -- if the JSON is intended for public consumption, and if it is documented as so. The problem, I'd argue, with JSON is that it does not intentionally facilitate semantic annotations, unlike HTML(5). I'd argue that a properly marked-up HTML5 representation of a piece of data is more useful than a bespoke JSON structure with crude naming liable to change without notice. The benefit I get with an HTML re…

You are building up a strawman against JSON without acknowledging that every problem you outline applies just as much, if not more, to HTML. Is the HTML of any popular website publicly documented? Is there any guarantee that an XPath to a particular value won't change? Is there any guarantee the data I need is marked up with semantically accurate class names? No. HTML is intended for public consumption—by a human, at…

Implement Readability in such a way that it can find and read any JSON api.

HTML is not perfect, but at least you can usually pick out which bit is the title and which bit is the article content through some heuristics.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#138

Post by dredmorbius »

hollerith wrote: post #88
crazygringo wrote: post #69

> Worrying about browsers without JavaScript is like worrying about whether you’re backwards compatible with HTML 3.2 or CSS2. At some point, you have to accept that some things are just part of the platform. This is the key bit. It's a pretty popular attitude on HN to dismiss supporting IE, or IE7, or even IE8 or IE9 -- despite having significant user bases. But there's still a strong vocal contingent which argues f…

It's not just the people with JavaScript turned off: it's people who, for example, rely on the Readability or Readable bookmarklets or Safari's Reader functionality. In general turning documents into programs deprives users of those documents of a kind flexibility that they enjoyed when documents were just data. And does it not bother you that web-browser development has gotten so complicated and labor-intensive that…

Amen to Readability.

Increasingly, site design does little but piss me off. I use a set of tools, Readability and Stylebot included (484 styles and counting, several of those applying to multiple sites) to address the more severe annoyances (H/N is one of my restyled sites). What's particularly annoying are content-heavy sites (blogs, online periodicals) which break Readability and/or aren't restylable with Stylebot (I recenty encountered a Blogger template which navigated to a different page when I tried editing CSS in the Stylebot editor).

In the original article, Tom notes:

At some point recently, the browser transformed from being an awesome interactive document viewer into being the world’s most advanced, widely-distributed application runtime.

That's pretty much the conclusion I'd reached, though my preference is that tools which are useful for presenting and managing content would be developed: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/LR7jubsX...

Readability is useful, but addresses only a subset of the features I'd like. I've been collecting a large set of literature through it and using Calibre. In particular I want bibliographic capabilities and indexing, as well as much larger tag lists (I ran into Readability's 500 tags per user limit within 3-4 days).

The other problem with JS is that I'm increasingly running into single Web apps which consume, literally, a gigabyte or more of memory (Google+ is perhaps the worst of these).

Which means: I could run a lightweight desktop application which provides a basic set of functionality ... or I can run a browser with perhaps a handful of tabs open, and absolutely pig out my system.

The browser is a decent rapid-development and rapid-deployment environment, but it's still seriously wanting for real productivity.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#139

Post by leif »

integraton wrote: post #67

Sometimes I wonder whether advocates for heavy client-side JavaScript ever bother to test on mobile devices, because it very much seems that in the majority of cases they don't. The vast majority of JavaScript-based "show HN" submissions I've seen don't work on mobile browsers well or at all, to the point where I've been trained not to click them. This submission from a few days ago is an example, and last I checked…

I think you just invented an internet forum with a proof-of-technical-proficiency requirement for each post. Well done, sir.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#140

Post by qu4z-2 »

antihero wrote: post #115
ris wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be fine if half the web didn't work for you? How about we say it's fine replacing text with images? We could always use alt tags for accessibility. The number of people who ever actually select/copy text from your website will be <1%, so why not just do away with it and get the text in any font we like, with any rendering style & layout we like?

Because that is an utterly ridiculous strawman. Using images for text is firstly almost entirely pointless, and has many many drawbacks that using JavaScript doesn't. For instance, it's a pain in the arse to maintain, it breaks text reflowing, it's huge, you have to deal with image compression, and it likely ruins the ability of search engines to spider your content without OCR. Not to mention that any decent screen…

I would argue it's fairly similar to using javascript to load documents. If you have a web-app, I'm a huge fan of javascript/client-side rendering. If you've got a blog, not so much.
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