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The Website Specification

specification.website

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Re: The Website Specification

#221

Post by KajMagnus »

replwoacause wrote: post #203

I don't understand why this submission has so many points. It's not good.

The whole website was apparently AI generated 3 days ago [0], leaves me wondering if this is partly a HN bots upvotes manipulation experiment. Or people here really think an AI gend docs website is top news nowadays? Has the HN demographics changed

When the website is AI generated anyway, why not ask Claude or Gemini directly instead of going to the specs website?

(Maybe it's useful to the author himself, but personally I don't have any reasons to trust the website more than asking an AI myself + asking for references)

[0] https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website/commit/d8ec...

Re: The Website Specification

#223

Post by swiftcoder »

Timwi wrote: post #212
pibaker wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't upvote this enough. People have very selective memory of how the 2000s web worked. Every other website requires Flash just to show you a carousel of images. "Serious" business websites implemented in slow, buggy Java applets. iframes everywhere. Incredibly fucked up tables with no semantic meanings in your HTML just to do what modern flexbox now does in two lines. No one cared about accessibility of anything. C…

> No one cared about accessibility of anything. I'm not dunking on your whole argument, but as for this specific point: as someone who finds the mouse difficult to use and requires the keyboard a lot, the web definitely used to be a lot more accessible in this regard. There's no keyboard navigability anymore. And it would be so simple, just put an accesskey attribute on your buttons and textboxes. Nobody does it, any…

> There's no keyboard navigability anymore. And it would be so simple, just put an accesskey attribute on your buttons and textboxes. Nobody does it, anywhere.

Nobody added those attributes in the 90s/2000s either, it's just that desktop apps (like browsers) all implemented keyboard navigation properly by default.

The real loss here isn't html authors being too lazy to add the attribute, it's that our modern desktop environments/apps stopped implementing keyboard navigation as a default

Re: The Website Specification

#224

Post by swiftcoder »

user3939382 wrote: post #202
neya wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're referring to the mid-late 2000s. I'm talking about the early 2000s. You can hate Flash all you want, but for all the HTML5 hype we had back then, there isn't a single authoring tool today that's not even equivalent to the original Flash Studio (by Macromedia). It was the only tool in internet's entire history where both artists and programmers could work on together. Or sometimes even without each other. What…

Tangential but I remember Flash being killed by Steve Jobs and then smartphones in general. The iPhone’s battery couldn’t handle it or in any case he didn’t want to support it. I remember Flash being so prominent when iPhone 1 came out that the decision not to support it was shocking.

> The iPhone’s battery couldn’t handle it or in any case he didn’t want to support it

Very much the latter. Apple didn't want to give Adobe control of a big part of their new ecosystem - and they were already at loggerheads over Apple shipping native PDF capabilities in OSX

Re: The Website Specification

#225

Post by dormento »

Latty wrote: post #11

"Agent Readiness" will likely age as well as "Web 4.0 Blockchain Integration" has. (To be entirely clear, not because agents won't be a relevant thing, although certainly I have my doubts, but because I believe even if they are a relevant thing, requiring special allowances from sites undermines the whole point, and such things will only end up used by bad actors to mismatch what agents see to what humans see, and so…

You know, there are many places around here that serve coke with a slice of lemon. In some of them, it comes by default: if you don't specify, there will be a slice of lemon on your glass. You can ask to hold the lemon, and even then, sometimes it will be there. "No biggie, I can just remove the slice of lemon, but man does it get tiresome after a while".

This is how I feel with this agents crap.

Re: The Website Specification

#228

Post by lenkite »

Kudos wrote: post #69
neya wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear to God. I just want to go back to the 2000s where everything was just plain HTML and some basic CSS, if at all any, by default you got responsive design out of the box, readable text and super user friendly GUI from the browser's own default stylesheet. Today you open any website. Everything is a fucking component. A simple dropdown with a finite list? Has its own loader and makes 10 fetch requests for no rea…

In the 2000s wasn't everything just misused/abused table layouts? Maybe we frequented different places, but that's how I remember it.

And today tailwindcss misuses the class attribute to add a gazillion classes that make your eyes bleed. By the time you reach the end of the list, you have grown a beard.

Re: The Website Specification

#229

Post by xp84 »

user3939382 wrote: post #204
xp84 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will always be a tension between those who want purely semantic documents and those who argue for a pragmatic allowance of layout to just be allowed in the document itself. It’s indisputable though that the modern BS of frontend tech is approaching an asymptote of ridiculous complexity. The divs go so deep that it is often pointless to even try to determine what’s going on from a web inspector. And I think the…

View Source on any major modern website and many (most?) others is useless. You get 15 lines with some cryptic webpacked JS references. It must be that we now have a new generation of devs that have no experience with the beauty of the original web where others’ pages were legible and you could as a human easily read and learn from their source. I’m not saying there are 0 tradeoffs but there’s definitely a loss there…

My first time wading into web development was hopping into the source of the MSN.com homepage circa 2000 to see how their DHTML menu rollovers worked, and then stealing it. It was mostly CSS, but to support some browsers they had JS assist with what's being moused over.

That kind of thing is utterly impossible to replicate with a modern frontend build -- all the classes are generated by styled components and all the behaviors are attached with React or Angular. Best you could hope for is to find some telltale attribute that points you toward an open-source library. Or, hope they left their sourcemaps on.

Re: The Website Specification

#230

Post by PullPage »

Structured data (JSON-LD) will be obsolet it seems in the future, thank's to AI. Google just killed FAQPage for example. End of support: From 7 May 2026, rich search results for FAQs will no longer appear in Google Search. The report on rich search results for FAQs will be removed in June 2026.
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