The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML • Hacker News Board

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#271

Post by ziftface » Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 3:34 AM UTC

com2kid wrote: post #245

ziftface wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact is, the Javascript ecosystem is unmatched when it comes to very quickly creating frontend applications. Maybe another set of tools would have been better, but that doesn't really matter. This set of tools is what everyone uses, and a lot of effort and creativity goes into making js frontend development as smooth and fast as possible. I often need to very quickly make internal services at my job and while I l…

> and if you're doing crud stuff, most of the work is frankly done for you. React sucks for large complex forms unless you pair it with another technology or two. Want to write a crud app fast? C# and Winforms. Couple years back, I once did a prototype of a web app in C# and Winforms connected to Firebase. Less than a day, done. Month later, had it working in React. Granted the React website looked nice, but the diff…

That's really interesting, I should look into that pattern, maybe it can be applied elsewhere (I have to maintain a vb6 application at work, and I'm not terribly interested in doing that anymore).

Yeah working with redux sucks in general imo, I try to avoid it when I can. If I can get away with it, I try to avoid the problem entirely by using hasura as a backend. But sometimes that's not viable.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#272

Post by ogre_codes » Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 3:40 AM UTC

inopinatus wrote: post #261

elliekelly wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Very few people have the skill to turn a div into an effective button, yet over and over I see web sites with rows of buttons which are in fact just divs with javascript behind them. What was the catalyst behind this trend? I just don’t understand the reason behind it. Hasn’t been around forever? Was there some limitation on the button tag that made the div tag more desirable?

Ironically, it's because of the ARIA Authoring Practices guidelines[1], which include exactly this sort of nonsense[2]. [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/ [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/#examples

I was listening to a podcast and they were talking about using semantic HTML instead of piles of divs. One of the things they mentioned was that a survey of public web sites showed that the presence of ARIA in html was usually a sign that a site would have poor usability. Mostly because it's a sign that the site has abandoned standard HTML and went their own way and tried to patch things up by smearing aria properties everywhere.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#273

Post by ogre_codes » Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 3:43 AM UTC

zepto wrote: post #209

ogre_codes wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Designers don't really know or understand the limits of how you can style a select box. Nor should they need to. A good team will work together around the limits. Also, FWIW some of the problem is with the browser makers (still!!). CSS still has a lot of browser specific quirks when working with some components.

“ Nor should they need to.” It’s funny - I’d expect an interior designer to know something about the limitations of the materials they work with. Why don’t we expect this of digital designers?

Interior designers know their limits too. For example a good one won't try to move walls without consulting an engineer.

I think that's somewhat like what the relationship between designers and developers should be.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#274

Post by slavik81 » Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 4:02 AM UTC

ogre_codes wrote: post #65

jcranmer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're not selling anything, then you're not engaged in commerce and you wouldn't qualify as a "public accommodation" and the law doesn't kick in for you. (Complete list of public accommodation is 24 USC §12181(7)-- https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/12181 ).

Right at the top of that page: > The term “commerce” means travel, trade, traffic, commerce, transportation, or communication It is pretty funny that their definition of commerce includes commerce, but seems like communication is on the list as well.

Seems to be a common thing. One of my favourites from The Canadian Customs Tariff Schedule, Ch. 71 § 4.B:

> The expression "platinum" means platinum, iridium, osmium, palladium, rhodium and ruthenium

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#275

Post by ziftface » Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 4:09 AM UTC

michaelpb wrote: post #264

scrollaway wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Django's user system is .. limited. You need a bunch of third party libraries to add very commonly used things such as auth APIs, oauth, 2fa, etc. I've worked with Django for over a decade and i dislike it more and more. It hasn't evolved to match the environment around it and how to best use it. Typing is missing. Something like FastAPI is very promising but Django's admin is still superb for prototyping and its orm…

Agreed, it definitely is limited. Also the admin panel is limited too, and although it's very extendable, the admin extension API is kind of clunky and inconsistent at times. Yeah FastAPI looks great! I've used Sanic in the past and FastAPI seems cool for some of the same reasons. I'm also following closely Django Hotwire - https://hotwire.dev/ I only brought up Django in a narrow context to challenge an assumption m…

Funny you should mention that, I'm watching that too, and I can't wait until that's to the point where it's just as easy and seamless to get something up and running in django or a similar framework, while also having all the advantages of a frontend application and a backend one. Hotwire does look very intriguing to me.

I think overall we need a new wave of backend frameworks with what we've learned in the past decade. I'm hoping it's in python or clojure, but my guess is it's going to be in javascript (see react server components for one potential contender).

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#276

Post by ocdtrekkie » Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 4:10 AM UTC

qwantim1 wrote: post #254

scrollaway wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDFs can be accessible, and many of them are! Everyone who works with PDF needs to know about PDF/A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A PDF/A is a small family of sub-formats to PDFs which amount to the accessible subset of PDF + some requirements. PDF/A and PDF/UA are mandated by a variety of governments for PDF distribution. They're very suitable to archival and are accessible (screenreaders can work with them, th…

PDFs are fine but their time will come to an end for one big reason: they were invented to reproduce defined-size paper forms.

This is their strength: You know a PDF will not shift its presentation due to device changes. PDFs from when the PDF was created still work right today. And they still look the same.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#277

Post by scrollaway » Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 4:26 AM UTC

ziftface wrote: post #275

michaelpb wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it definitely is limited. Also the admin panel is limited too, and although it's very extendable, the admin extension API is kind of clunky and inconsistent at times. Yeah FastAPI looks great! I've used Sanic in the past and FastAPI seems cool for some of the same reasons. I'm also following closely Django Hotwire - https://hotwire.dev/ I only brought up Django in a narrow context to challenge an assumption m…

Funny you should mention that, I'm watching that too, and I can't wait until that's to the point where it's just as easy and seamless to get something up and running in django or a similar framework, while also having all the advantages of a frontend application and a backend one. Hotwire does look very intriguing to me. I think overall we need a new wave of backend frameworks with what we've learned in the past deca…

I've been in the NextJS world lately and it's honestly gotten really good. Nowhere near perfect yet but they are clearly on the right track and it's already more than usable.

NextJS+Django is my current stack of choice.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#278

Post by SquareWheel » Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 4:29 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #231

ryandrake wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this would be the best. Web site provides the content and the browser (user agent) decides how best to render it, potentially different than how the web developer would want it.

And that was the original goal. Sadly, the marketing people won and turned the web into a glorified magazine delivery service. Remember when browsers supported user styles out of the box and put them in a somewhat discoverable location?

I remember users setting their default font sizes to 30px, then complaining when they hit the one piece of text on a website with an undefined text size.

User-defined formatting hasn't worked since CSS was introduced.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#279

Post by chrismorgan » Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 4:37 AM UTC

ndiddy wrote: post #211

chrismorgan wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is that you can’t support HTTP without completely undermining HTTPS. If you support HTTP at all , you’re damaging the experience for the almost everyone that could have used HTTPS: almost no one will get the HTTPS version unless you deliberately push them over to it, which you will only be able to do after page load by some JavaScript-based user-agent or feature-based sniffing, so now the page loads and t…

> almost no one will get the HTTPS version unless you deliberately push them over to it, which you will only be able to do after page load by some JavaScript-based user-agent or feature-based sniffing, so now the page loads and then reloads immediately, every time the user visits your site by URL This is false. All you have to do is configure your webserver to only redirect port 80 requests to port 443 if the request…

Ah yes, I had completely forgotten about upgrade-insecure-requests. This mitigates a lot of what I was complaining of, though, as you say, it’s still subject to downgrade attacks at some points. Thanks for the correction.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#280

Post by userbinator » Thu, Jan 28, 2021, 4:40 AM UTC

greggturkington wrote: post #163

vascocosta wrote: post #155

The simple HTML of Hacker News is one of the reasons I love it so much. What a breath of fresh hair compared to modern Reddit.

Yeah. tags for presentation (with no `alt` attr). Form s without s. No skip link, no landmark regions. s with s inside for non-tabular content. tags. FONT TAGS. "A breath of fresh hair" is a typo that accidentally makes a good comparison.

Nonetheless, the fact that it works in browsers as old as IE6 (haven't tried anything before that) is living proof of the fact that dogmatic "best practices" cargo-culting is, practically speaking, of zero or even negative value.