Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

blog.logrocket.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 271 posts

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#101

Post by bobwaycott »

Kalium wrote: post #76
bobwaycott wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I know there are extensions for this. I was talking about what I wish for--browsers blocking all the extraneous requests by default and just showing me the page content alone in reader view without downloading all the additional crap.

It's worth considering that one of the many, many wonderful things about the modern internet and modern browsers is that you don't have to sit and wait passively for someone to deliver the experience you want to you. You have everything you need to make Firefox or Chromium do it for you! Then you can share it with others, and they can have the automagic, fresh-from-the-box, on-by-default experience you would like.

I've been doing this internet thing for nearly 25 years now. I'm not ignorant of all the things I can do on the "modern" internet or browsers. I'm not waiting around passively for someone to deliver experiences I want--I build software, ffs.

I made a simple statement about what I wish browsers did by default. That means no extensions. That means that--unless I'm going to fork a browser to build it myself--building yet another extension to do these things in a sea of extensions that do these things still doesn't change what I wish browsers offered by default. You're now the 3rd person who has appeared to misunderstand the intent of my comment(s).

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#102

Post by rayiner »

jahewson wrote: post #78
jandrese wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heaven forbid your buttons look like buttons.

The point being that the file input button doesn’t look like any other button on their website. But hey, why solve a problem when you can force the entire world to accommodate it? Why does there even have to be a button? I want an API not a button...

> The point being that the file input button doesn’t look like any other button on their website. But hey, why solve a problem when you can force the entire world to accommodate it?

Why don't the buttons on your website look like HIG-compliant buttons on whatever platform the user is using? That's what web chrome looked like back in the aughts and it was fantastic. Apparently you can still do it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Forms/Th....

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#103

Post by ralusek »

crunchlibrarian wrote: post #95
aidenn0 wrote: post #43

I'm still looking for "just use links". So many frontends I see use fancy onclicks to emulate links (including updating window.location). However they are either not links or are void links. This breaks all sorts of useful things (copy link location, open in new tab &c.).

Remember flat html? Remember servers that would generate pages? Remember when CSS preprocessors didn't peg the CPU for 50ms? Maybe we should investigate this ancient tech of the old ones.

I've never seen a setup where a css preprocessor didn't just generate the output once at build-time.

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#104

Post by lhorie »

jahewson wrote: post #73
aidenn0 wrote: post #43

I'm still looking for "just use links". So many frontends I see use fancy onclicks to emulate links (including updating window.location). However they are either not links or are void links. This breaks all sorts of useful things (copy link location, open in new tab &c.).

I agree for cases where the text is supposed to behave like a hyperlink - it should be one. But in cases where its behaviour is that of a button (even a button which has the appearance of blue text - think iOS) then onclick is a good choice. Especially for contexts where “open in new tab” makes no sense. I can’t see any valid reason for using a void link - worst of both worlds?

I recall reading a story about someone who had implemented some sort of table using links for actions. At some point the app data mysteriously got wiped out. Turned out a user had Alexa toolbar installed and it crawled the "delete" links on each row (as well as all the pagination links)...

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#105

Post by edflsafoiewq »

aidenn0 wrote: post #43

I'm still looking for "just use links". So many frontends I see use fancy onclicks to emulate links (including updating window.location). However they are either not links or are void links. This breaks all sorts of useful things (copy link location, open in new tab &c.).

I especially love when these not-links can't be clicked (for God knows what reason) using a stylus, rendering them unusable unless I hook up a mouse.

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#106

Post by nicoburns »

lhorie wrote: post #104
jahewson wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree for cases where the text is supposed to behave like a hyperlink - it should be one. But in cases where its behaviour is that of a button (even a button which has the appearance of blue text - think iOS) then onclick is a good choice. Especially for contexts where “open in new tab” makes no sense. I can’t see any valid reason for using a void link - worst of both worlds?

I recall reading a story about someone who had implemented some sort of table using links for actions. At some point the app data mysteriously got wiped out. Turned out a user had Alexa toolbar installed and it crawled the "delete" links on each row (as well as all the pagination links)...

This is easily solves by using an invisible form with hidden elements...

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#107

Post by billysielu »

nicoburns wrote: post #106
lhorie wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall reading a story about someone who had implemented some sort of table using links for actions. At some point the app data mysteriously got wiped out. Turned out a user had Alexa toolbar installed and it crawled the "delete" links on each row (as well as all the pagination links)...

This is easily solves by using an invisible form with hidden elements...

2 wrongs don't make a right

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#108

Post by vinceguidry »

rayiner wrote: post #102
jahewson wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point being that the file input button doesn’t look like any other button on their website. But hey, why solve a problem when you can force the entire world to accommodate it? Why does there even have to be a button? I want an API not a button...

> The point being that the file input button doesn’t look like any other button on their website. But hey, why solve a problem when you can force the entire world to accommodate it? Why don't the buttons on your website look like HIG-compliant buttons on whatever platform the user is using? That's what web chrome looked like back in the aughts and it was fantastic. Apparently you can still do it: https://developer.mo…

Question, is the point of HIG-compliance to make everything look exactly the same on a platform? Or is it to nail down some abstract sense of what makes UI intuitive to use?

It seems like people with this viewpoint pay lip service to the latter goal, which allows for trends like Material Design so long as they fit with the guidelines, while really wanting the former, which to me looks like nothing more than tilting at windmills.

I'd post screenshots of our current CMS work, where we have a design staff working earnestly to make everything super-intuitive, but HN doesn't do image management so this discussion will be sadly deprived of examples.

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#109

Post by zlynx »

ralusek wrote: post #103
crunchlibrarian wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember flat html? Remember servers that would generate pages? Remember when CSS preprocessors didn't peg the CPU for 50ms? Maybe we should investigate this ancient tech of the old ones.

I've never seen a setup where a css preprocessor didn't just generate the output once at build-time.

Oh, people can abuse anything. Maybe they want their CSS all in-line at the top of the dynamic HTML. So they run the preprocessor during page generation on the server.

Use a separate CSS via link tag? Oh no, I heard that was slow. Set expires cache header for 1 day? Oh no, that makes testing hard for me and what if the CSS changes?

Web developers sometimes use the dumbest reasons to avoid doing good things.

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#110

Post by Washuu »

vinceguidry wrote: post #37

Reading this article made me realize what it is that's broken about the concept of semantic markup and why websites even today are div soup. It's the same reason why divs won in the first place. You can't dictate the shape of a document to people and it be anything other than a kludge. Take the site I work on, Great Big Story[1]. We have sections and headers, but our content isn't defined by text, it's defined by gra…

The site you work on is blank if Javascript is turned off. I do not see anything in particular on the home page that should require Javascript to render.
Post reply on HN