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Just use HTML

justfuckingusehtml.com

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Re: Just use HTML

#121

Post by ryandrake »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #88
ryandrake wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site is beautiful in that it is fast, flexible across multiple screen shapes, readable, and accessible. If only more web sites would make these choices!

Back when monitors were 4:3 at 640x480, these plain HTML sites were readable and scrollable. It is 2025. Our ultrawide, ultrasmall, ultraresoultion screens make this a chore to read without playing with zoom levels.

What’s a real chore to read are all those “modern” sites with dark gray text on light gray background, 8pt font, and text constrained to a tiny 4inch wide column in the middle of the monitor. The fact that browsers had to all go implement a separate “reader mode” so that web sites can even be readable again is damning.

Re: Just use HTML

#122

Post by bradly »

reconnecting wrote: post #106
bradly wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice! I'm working on a private Recipe bookmarking site that currently has no JavaScript and minimal CSS. https://github.com/bradly/recipin

It's says 'Your browser is not supported. Please upgrade your browser to continue.'

Thank you. That is a bug and I will investigate. CloudFlare does inject JS into the outgoing HTML for email address obfuscation in the footer. I may need to remove that.

Re: Just use HTML

#123

Post by sam_lowry_ »

I would have added a section about tab index.

Tab indices is lost sacred knowledge.

Places like GitHub, GitLab and even Zed homepage break Vimium by adding "shortcuts" without even thinking to implement proper tab indices.

Re: Just use HTML

#125

Post by reconnecting »

bradly wrote: post #122
reconnecting wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's says 'Your browser is not supported. Please upgrade your browser to continue.'

Thank you. That is a bug and I will investigate. CloudFlare does inject JS into the outgoing HTML for email address obfuscation in the footer. I may need to remove that.

When I took my first full time webdev job (23 years ago), our company had always used outdated browsers because it helped to prevent bugs earlier.

Time flies, but I'm still not on the latest browser, and it helps a lot.

Re: Just use HTML

#126

Post by Gualdrapo »

noisem4ker wrote: post #97
pfg_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's super zoomed out on my phone, it doesn't have a mobile viewport. And if you do want to read text, you have to zoom in more than the width of the full page so you have to constantly scroll left and right.

This is a failure or regression of mobile browsers. We once had automatic line wrapping (Opera Mobile did it best back in its Presto engine days) which provided readable size paragraphs and avoided the need for horizontal scrolling. The onus of adapting the presentation to the medium shifted to the websites, while browsers lost agency.

I'd like to see how that worked. In my mind I'd guess such a feature could have been great for one column layouts, like in this website, but I can't imagine how it would be for the then-traditional layouts of a left sidebar navigation column and a right area for content.

Re: Just use HTML

#127

Post by Etheryte »

reconnecting wrote: post #120
uallo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sets the width to a mininum of 800px, no matter what phone model or browser you use. I'm a little confused how you can can claim this "Works well on any device" when apparently it was not tested on a phone. I, too, closed the tab before I even had a chance to learn about your product. Update: Not OP, but I'm on a Pixel 8a with Firefox.

This is a software website, and we don't expect many visitors from mobile devices. However, I'll check if this issue can be resolved without using CSS. Thanks for letting me know.

I think this is a classic case of familiarity blind spot. It's easy to think of your users as people similar to you, but that's not necessarily the case. Statistically mobile phone users outnumber non-mobile users online nearly two to one, some statistics put the estimate even higher.

Re: Just use HTML

#128

Post by throwanem »

xnorswap wrote: post #119
throwanem wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can configure that as a default in Safari, and manually opt sites out to allow them to render normally; I use the setting on iOS and have for years. I think Firefox requires an extension (vendoring Readability.js) to behave similarly, since it doesn't expose its built-in version even to extension developers. (I don't think that's even part of the manifest spec.) I've never wanted the behavior on a desktop browser…

I'm not asking for default loading sites into readability mode, just that the button to load a site in readability mode isn't arbitrarily hidden. I don't understand how hiding a button is "giving users control". Wouldn't it be under more control of the user to always have the button to load in reader mode available?

Oh, I see what you mean. The option is surfaced where a page has "enough" text according to Readability's heuristic. Where absent, it wouldn't be able to do anything useful anyway. (It is doing something a lot more sophisticated than just document.write(Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('')).map(({ innerText }) => `

${innerText}

`).join()).)

I can't really speak to the details of that heuristic this decade, but I believe an early version of Mozilla's reader-mode implementation (maybe also the basis for others) still to be available on Github under the name "Readability.js", which should provide a suitable reference implementation for further review. (This is also why I keep calling it "Readability;" that was the name it wore when we met.) I assume a current version is also available in the Firefox source.

iOS Safari's implementation is always available, even when the "Show Reader" menu option is grayed out, the equivalent of Firefox hiding the button: long-press the "aA" context-menu icon in the URL bar. But if the page can't be rendered usefully in reader mode, all that will happen is the regular haptic to tell you the system recognized your input.

Re: Just use HTML

#129

Post by reconnecting »

Etheryte wrote: post #127
reconnecting wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a software website, and we don't expect many visitors from mobile devices. However, I'll check if this issue can be resolved without using CSS. Thanks for letting me know.

I think this is a classic case of familiarity blind spot. It's easy to think of your users as people similar to you, but that's not necessarily the case. Statistically mobile phone users outnumber non-mobile users online nearly two to one, some statistics put the estimate even higher.

This is a misleading reference to statistics without context. It's not a B2C website, and in fact, most of our audience accesses it from Linux devices rather than mobile Firefox.

Anyway, even if someone does visit using mobile Firefox, it only takes one zoom-in/ zoom-out to adjust. So it's not really a webpage code issue, it's more about how Firefox renders pages on mobile devices.

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