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HTML First

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Re: HTML First

#461

Post by LeonB »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #404
DangitBobby wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Present a form with a 25 item native multiselect to 10 of your non-prgrammer family members. Ask them to perform two tasks: - Select 5 non-adjacent items - Select 5 adjacent items. Report back with success rates.

The nice thing about native behaviors is you only have to teach them once. Custom behaviors per application make it harder for people to develop a model of how their computer works because you have to learn a new interaction model per application. I’m pretty anti the notion that UX is intuitive in any sense: all human-computer interaction is learned at some point and we should focus more on educating people how to do…

That two-window approach was particular useful where you needed to be able to rearrange the order of the items.

Now we tend to have a part of the record appearing to have texture (stripes or bumps) as a clue that grabbing it will afford pushing it up or down.

There’s many little common standards like that which have never appeared in “out of the box” controls provided by the platforms.

Re: HTML First

#462

Post by rando832 »

codeptualize wrote: post #89

This is fun in to theory and in simple examples, but show me a big project that applies this and how it made a difference. There are some bold objectives at the start that would be wonderful, but I’m a bit disappointed by the advice. I really don’t see how these would work in anything other than very basic scenarios, even less how they would achieve the objectives. I’m all for using the web platform to the max, and I…

https://www.gnu.org

Re: HTML First

#463

Post by MrJohz »

chii wrote: post #444
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React simply diffs the DOM and updates it in an efficient way. If you are putting weird divs instead of anchors and buttons (or instead of special components provided by a React-based framework), that's entirely on you.

if you're using react and then hand roll custom components and don't do accessibility, then it's just as bad as choosing a component framework which doesn't do accessibility. I am not talking about react (or any framework directly) specifically. > entirely on you of course - choosing a framework or hand rolling one makes no difference. It's still not production ready, if it doesn't have accessibility built in.

I think the point they're making is that you'd have the same problems with developers working HTML-first. Accessibility does not simply come for free in either situation, you need to make sure it's present.

Choosing, for example, whether to use a div with a click handler, or a proper button, is a decision you need to make regardless of whether or not you're using a framework.

So it seems incorrect to say that you lost accessibility in this case due to the framework. You lost accessibility due to developers who didn't understand the web platform well enough to design proper accessible controls. If they hadn't used a framework, they'd probably still not have made the site accessible.

Re: HTML First

#464

Post by matijsvzuijlen »

gedy wrote: post #415
resonious wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to push for an "HTML first" style frontend at my job, but we hired some run-of-the-mill frontend devs and they basically didn't get it and just wanted everything to be divs with VueJS controlling all of the logic and content. One semi-objective thing we lost was accessibility. Much of the site is impossible to navigate via keyboard due to naively re-implemented behavior like links being divs with click event…

> One semi-objective thing we lost was accessibility. TBH that's not a framework vs HTML issue, that's just sloppy or inexperienced devs

What could the frameworks do to make it more natural for inexperienced developers to do the right thing?

Re: HTML First

#466

Post by Karrot_Kream »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #441
xgb84j wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. I personally always like Angular and React, because even with most simple projects there is this one feature that is so ridiculously complicated that making it slightly easier to develop and maintain is important to me. I'll gladly write thousands of lines of boilerplate just so I make it easier for me to succeed in developing this one endboss feature. If you do not have at least this one insane…

I always see this as a communication/management failure. Product folks come up with features. They have no idea how hard those features are to implement. Which in a way is a blessing; they'll come up with the best features if they don't have to consider the implementation details. But because there are always trade-offs in implementation they also don't understand those. A feature that is super difficult to implement…

> The failure in communication is usually "you're just the nerd pushing the nerd buttons, you don't have valid opinions on product design" which is a cause of so, so many problems in our industry.

But are they that wrong? We compute to, well, do things with our lives. To find out how to go places, to pay bills, to talk with friends, to meet with people, to learn about things. A view that computation should come with technical (e.g. tech bloat) limitations in mind feels important only to technical people and not to actual computing.

Re: HTML First

#467

Post by listenallyall »

_gabe_ wrote: post #452
listenallyall wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a booking process with various entry points on the website, which slightly change the booking logic. Also you can book as a new user, as a logged in user, for somebody else etc. Also the logic is changing at regular intervals The more complex the business logic, and the more options there are, and the more it is expected to change, the more it benefits the development team to write that code in their language of ch…

> the more it benefits the development team to write that code in their language of choice on the backend Why? TS is maintainable and very pleasant to code in. Most people’s computers are way faster than making round trips to a server. You talk about serializing everything to/from JSON, but my phone can do that in milliseconds (if not faster). Compare that to 100-200ms of latency between a faraway server, and all of…

> Compare that to 100-200ms of latency between a faraway server

A complex booking engine like an airline or Stubhub needs constant, almost real-time connectivity with a database, otherwise you risk selling product at a stale price, double-selling, selling to an unauthenticated person, getting taxes and fees wrong, missing custom post-sale add-on opportunities, and lots of other potential problems. The client has to make a lot of network calls, so you're going to deal with latency, there's no client-side solution that avoids it without risking the issues above.

Re: HTML First

#468

Post by zlg_codes »

josephg wrote: post #372
zlg_codes wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't disagree with making sure you're using them when they matter and avoiding them when they don't. There was no real 'war', XHTML 5 is still a thing. Browsers are HTML engines because people who write HTML don't want to be forced into well-formed markup. They want the browser to guess what they meant and run with it. There's also the whole "we need to be compatible with almost every HTML file dating back to the…

> There was no real 'war' There was definitely a debate over how web browsers should interpret web pages - as XHTML or "quirks mode". HTML5 (with infinite backwards compatibility) was the outcome. Every major web browser implements HTML5 - complete with its super quirky and complex, but fully specified and consistent parsing rules. > XHTML 5 is still a thing. Is it though? On the web? I just tried, with this html: yo…

I'm going to let this link to a simple XHTML document speak for itself. I've configured it to work on lighttpd via the `mime-types.conf` file, and even have a commented-out meta tag you can use to fake it in cases where you can't manipulate a server.

https://zlg.space/misc/example.xhtml

Let me know how your browser sees it.

Re: HTML First

#469

Post by edanm »

tabacitu wrote: post #145
codeptualize wrote: post #89

This is fun in to theory and in simple examples, but show me a big project that applies this and how it made a difference. There are some bold objectives at the start that would be wonderful, but I’m a bit disappointed by the advice. I really don’t see how these would work in anything other than very basic scenarios, even less how they would achieve the objectives. I’m all for using the web platform to the max, and I…

Why? Why does it need to be good for big projects in order to be good practice? I’m genuinely asking. I never understood this argument that people bring. In my view, the web is 95% small to medium projects. Most technologies should be focused on that - simple solutions for simple projectS. Add complexity later.

> In my view, the web is 95% small to medium projects.

I'm not sure that view is correct. For one thing, I'm not sure how you even define this.

As technology has advanced, many of the "small/medium" projects that used to require lots of dev time have turned into fully-built alternatives. The days when you need a dev to setup a blog are gone, as are the days you need one to setup a store, or a simple marketing website.

Are these part of the 95%? In some sense, yes, but in the sense of giving advice on a framework to choose, not at all, because no dev will even be making that choice - it's irrelevant.

As for medium-sized projects, there are tens of thousands of small, internal company tools that aren't even on the open internet. They probably fit your definition of being medium sized, let's say have a few devs working on them for many years, certainly medium sized compared to FB etc - but I'm not sure that whether this approach is right or wrong for them. (Genuinely not sure!)

I'm just saying, you need to much better define what you mean by small and medium sized, because some people might be thinking of my definition, while for some people medium-sized is, idk, AirBNB, which is tiny compared to FB but gigantic compared to most projects out there.

Re: HTML First

#470

Post by zlg_codes »

zlg_codes wrote: post #328
iFreilicht wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting example. Why would you say VSCode is a mess? I feel like it's not in line with the current UX Zeitgeist I assume you're referring to (touch-first, wasteful whitespace, manipulative patterns, reduced functionality) at all. It provides multiple layers of access to functionality that allow the user to choose their trade-off between discoverability and speed. The UI is compact with very little padding and sho…

VS Code is a mess because there are few places I can click in the UI without triggering some weird part of the UI. Almost the entirety of the bottom bar is reactive. The sidebar has too many views to keep straight, it has an extension store or something? Using VS Code feels like handling a tool with no handle. I'm sure it has something useful but I feel overwhelmed and constrained when I use it. I can't depend on any…

I find the silence that accompanies the negative score above to be rather damning of this community. I was asked why I felt the way I did, and I explained it. If you have a problem or disagree, show it in the comments.
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