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I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

blind.guru

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Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#171

Post by jbverschoor »

blauditore wrote: post #38
TeMPOraL wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be the first (EDIT: third) of six. > If all that stuff works for everyone, why did we invent new stuff? Just because? Or perhaps it wasn't really as amazing as well all remember. To better track people and push ads. It's really mostly just it. Modern web has very little to do with providing value to the end-user; any utility that's provided is mostly a side effect, and/or a vector to lure people into situations…

Come on, you can't be serious about this. Creating sophisticated web pages is massively easier than 10 or 20 years ago. Yes, HTML of plain simple text-only pages is still pretty much the same, but most users actually prefer visually fancier content with pictures and colors. Yes, companies presenting themselvses online profit of more capabilities. And yes, presenting ads is probably easier too. But if you think those…

It's actually because we programmers like to recreate things, because there's this itch and wonder about how stuff works. Http hasn't changed that much.

Html did. It was hyper text, and rendering was done for document flow.

Then we could script a bit, and soon after we wanted "webapplications". Now, we lost probably 15 years trying to fit in an application-ui and lifecycle model in a document-flow model.

Html, or rather xml, or rather trees, are a good way to represent a user interface. Unfortunately back then, the only languages available were C++ and Java for any proper work oh yeah, and visual basic!).

Javascript, php, and perl were a godsend in terms of productivity. Just like the 80s home computers and basic. It just worked. Type and run. This is also why bad badsoftware gets popular btw..

Coming back to the post.. Lynx renders HTML how it was intended: as a document.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#172

Post by e12e »

Avery3R wrote: post #132
patmcguire wrote: post #120

Did they also remove link wrapping with this? The HREF goes straight to the destination for me now on Chrome, where previously it went to some Google domain redirect. It's there on the first HTML load too, it's not a JS thing after the fact. Is there a different response for Lynx or are they formatting it in such a way that Lynx doesn't pick it up?

They're using the ping property of the element now, the only good thing to come out of this

Hm, so now I can go straight to the Google hosted AMP version without bumping through Google an extra time first? /s

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#173

Post by projektfu »

leesalminen wrote: post #86
TeMPOraL wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a cop-out. Being a developer and a long-time computer user biases me, but also gives me a more informed perspective on what's productive and ergonomic, and what's distracting and annoying. I can name the issues I see, instead of writing off the frustration as "this computer must have viruses" or "this is just how things have to be". Bloat because of inefficient design isn't delivering any value to regular peop…

In my experience (years of talking IRL with thousands of users of my B2B SaaS product), there exists a large cohort of users that don't want to improve their computer skills. They want the software to make things as absolutely "user friendly" as possible. As an example, I tried standardizing on across our product (hundreds of fields). Within 24 hours we logged >1,000 tickets with users saying they disliked the change…

This seems to be exactly where progressive enhancement is preferred. If you use input=date, it’ll probably work on mobile much better than s as JavaScript calendar solution. Also, I hope your date picker also allows typing by hand on desktop, otherwise may God have mercy on your soul...

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#174

Post by joshuamorton »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #166
joshuamorton wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no: Ajax allows interactive (snappier/faster) behavior in most cases, especially for complex interaction flows. Using the minimal html Gmail interface vs the modern one, the modern one is quicker for complex interactions because I end up loading fewer pages,even if the average load is more expensive.

It doesn't feel faster to me. And that's the case with Ajax in general - in principle , it can allow for snappier, faster experience. In practice, it rarely does.

I just measured it: switching between "drafts" and "inbox" on the new gmail takes ~15 ms, while on the simple HTML view, it takes 3-500ms per load.

Its literally 20 times faster, and importantly, cuts across the human visual perception boundary, which is at ~200ms. So the old HTML version is human perceptible, while the new version renders in ~1 frame.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#175

Post by inciampati »

eggie wrote: post #117
hombre_fatal wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG results are so much worse for me, especially anything longer tail or in Spanish, that I switch to Google when I'm actually getting work done. I find myself adding "!g" to an important search just to check for any results that DDG doesn't know about and it's almost always an upgrade to see Google's results. Search is hard. I don't like to chime in to say something negative about an underdog like DDG, but I see thi…

I know you're probably annoyed that I'm telling you that you're using ddg wrong. That's not exactly what I'm saying. It's more like: we're trained to expect certain things from the search engine, and so it's hard to switch. > Or consider how "elm dict" in Google takes me to https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/elm/core/latest/Dict (#1 result), but https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elm+dict&t=h_&ia=web in DDG doesn't (nowher…

A comment on my comment. It is really true that Google indexes the deep web of generated content (like AliExpress, eBay, and others) better than ddg. That's part of the long tail that's costly to cover.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#176

Post by projektfu »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #55
javajosh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Modern web has very little to do with providing value to the end-user I disagree strongly with this. The web has moved a lot in the direction of developer experience (ES6, modules) and new capabilities (WebSockets, WebRTC, WebAudio, SVG, canvas...). Yes, most of this happened because it's a side-effect of big surveillance capitalism companies wanting make that sweet sweet digital pollen to be even sweeter, but that…

The capabilities are there. The dev experience is there (somewhat; JS ecosystem is a mess, but I guess that's just a side effect of moving very fast). But the capabilities are not used for end-user benefit. Not much, anyway. Yes, I benefit from Netflix, I benefit from Google products (not as much as I would if they didn't keep on worsening the UX every few months) - and such functionality requires some of the new cap…

I think a pizza ordering site is a good SPA example, but progressive enhancement still applies. React probably makes its design simpler. Elm would, even more so. But it’d be nice to access it with Lynx.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#177

Post by tbodt »

hvdijk wrote: post #63
exikyut wrote: post #9

Curious, I installed lynx just to check this out. I find that I physically cannot navigate to the links in the page except the first few at the top. But. On the pages I get, the ... structure is still 100% intact. It's buried in a table and div soup, but it's there. So, I argue Lynx parsing bug! The author of this article would have done well to save and diff the working/not-working HTML they received. :(

Not really a bug more than an outdated browser not being updated for HTML 5. In HTML 4, ... is an error and Lynx deals with this by implicitly closing the , turning it into a hidden link (which can still be followed by pressing 'l'). In HTML 5, ... is valid.

Google actually detects the Lynx user agent and sends an HTML 4 page, but apparently this new code wasn't written with that in mind.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#178

Post by arkh »

Pete_D wrote: post #138
dredmorbius wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fundamental principle of the Web is that site-specific clients or apps shouldn't be necessary. That they are only underscores Google's massive blunder here. Yes, there've been CLI wrappers around web queries before. Until the past few years, these simply addressed search format, URI arguments, and namespace. They launched in the user's choice of browser, text or graphical. Surfraw is the classic, I've written a few…

> A fundamental principle of the Web is that site-specific clients or apps shouldn't be necessary. I think this ship, if it hasn't sailed already, is at least starting its engines and getting ready to leave the harbour. User agents and servers are increasingly trending towards an adversarial relationship, where the user doesn't want to do much of what the server is asking of it. This has been true from the first pop-…

https://weboob.org/ will become mainstream.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#179

Post by rodgerd »

alexis_fr wrote: post #50
SilasX wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Following standards has great side-effects all around. The same things that break sites for the blind also break it for UX-enhancement extensions like Tridactyl, which lets you click elements from the keyboard, so long as sites don't go out of the way to make clickable buttons undiscoverable. (Extreme apologies for any implied equivalence between myself and the blind.)

Blind enablement also allows easier webscraping , which is what I think Google is more worried about. It has solutions, like Google voicing out the contents, instead of doing a webpage that is so scrappable that screenreaders can parse it.

Google is mostly focused on trying to kill URLs at the moment, both in their pages and Chrome.

Accessibility is "just" a side effect in their EEE war on users.

Re: I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx

#180

Post by e12e »

Avery3R wrote: post #132
patmcguire wrote: post #120

Did they also remove link wrapping with this? The HREF goes straight to the destination for me now on Chrome, where previously it went to some Google domain redirect. It's there on the first HTML load too, it's not a JS thing after the fact. Is there a different response for Lynx or are they formatting it in such a way that Lynx doesn't pick it up?

They're using the ping property of the element now, the only good thing to come out of this

On a more substantial note, that's documented here:

https://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-20080122/#hyperlink0

It's a little odd, to see that a browser "must parse", but also "may either ignore the ping attribute altogether, or selectively ignore URIs".

It strikes me as a bit clumsy compared to the typical MUST/SHOULD/MAY wording.

Anyone (other than Google) using a-pings?

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