Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

blog.logrocket.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 271 posts

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#61

Post by traverseda »

vinceguidry wrote: post #37

Reading this article made me realize what it is that's broken about the concept of semantic markup and why websites even today are div soup. It's the same reason why divs won in the first place. You can't dictate the shape of a document to people and it be anything other than a kludge. Take the site I work on, Great Big Story[1]. We have sections and headers, but our content isn't defined by text, it's defined by gra…

Well, it's a problem of mixing data and visual elements.

In a good model of the web, html is your data, css is your styling, and javascript doesn't really exist.

In another model of the web, your data would be your data, html/css would work together to form a scene-graph. Javascript defines the relationship between your data and it's scene graph.

That friction, are we using html as data or as part of our scene-graph, is what causes a lot of these problems.

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#62

Post by justsomedude43 »

seorphates wrote: post #34
jhardy54 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://bestmotherfucking.website/

I can appreciate hn is mostly humor intolerant but these are all basically right on point. The web experience is now akin to walking the mall; loud, expensive, garbage.

Pretty much, I just said "haha" and I got 5 downvotes in 20min. :)

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#63

Post by canadianwriter »

caymanjim wrote: post #31
another-cuppa wrote: post #3

Posted on Medium with a massive pointless image at the top and page loaded asynchronously using JS.

For some reason, font sizes have shot through the roof in the past few years. Medium is one of the biggest offenders. You get maybe 2-3 paragraphs per page now, when entire articles would fit on a single screen page with normal-sized fonts.

It massively increases readability.

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#64

Post by vanderZwan »

rpeden wrote: post #60
rayiner wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that's why that happens. Why on earth would you break one of the most foundational aspects of HTML that way?

Breaking it is completely unnecessary too, even with single page apps. It's not all that hard to build a React or Angular apps that use proper links along with the browser history API. Designed properly, the apps should be able to load their state and render correctly even when deep-linked to somewhere other than the app's top level. This isn't a new concern - I remember paying attention to this back in the old days…

It's such an extremely simple litmus test: if it breaks the back button of the browser, it's the wrong design. The closest thing to an exception being cases where one needs to be logged in to see a page, or when links are consciously invalidated for some other reason. And even then the website/webapp should still just signal this to the user without a bazillion redirects.

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#65

Post by s73v3r_ »

jandrese wrote: post #51
vinceguidry wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the file input button, unless things have changed in the last year since I had to build one. Other buttons, sure, but not on file inputs.

Heaven forbid your buttons look like buttons.

If you want to fight that fight with design, go right ahead. The rest of us have work to do.

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#66

Post by dexterdog »

lmm wrote: post #24
pjc50 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know Medium did "white label" blogs on non-medium.com domains, but that's what this is. The irony is that people go to medium because it's kind of .. expected somehow? And looks more authoritative?

People use Medium because it's the easiest way to write some plain text and have what you wrote look decent in the browser. That's all it comes down to.

It's also a great way to discourage discussion because navigating the comment section of medium is an exercise in futility.

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#67

Post by bobwaycott »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #49
bobwaycott wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could set reader mode as the default experience. Then, I’d click on something to load the full experience when I know/think it’s needed (and perhaps have my browser remember that choice). Currently, I can only enable reader mode after my browser has loaded all the shit I don’t want loaded.

NoScript

Yeah, NoScript isn't news to me. I'm talking about what I wish a browser would do--out of the box, by default, zero config and third-party add-ons required.

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#68

Post by taeric »

vinceguidry wrote: post #37

Reading this article made me realize what it is that's broken about the concept of semantic markup and why websites even today are div soup. It's the same reason why divs won in the first place. You can't dictate the shape of a document to people and it be anything other than a kludge. Take the site I work on, Great Big Story[1]. We have sections and headers, but our content isn't defined by text, it's defined by gra…

The whole debate between semantic markup and visual styling in CSS looks to me to be a massive exercise in people yelling past each other and needlessly making all life difficult.

I've ranted about this before, but worse is that everyone insists on trying to go with the default flow of elements as much as they can. Example I used last time was that it is actually easy to layout things and have them look pretty solid between browsers, iff you embrace absolute positioning. http://taeric.github.io/cube-permutations-1.html is a page where I played with laying out a Rubik's cube. I confess I have not tried it in all browsers, as I don't care too much, but it works in all of my browsers, including my phone. I shudder to think how I could have done that with just using floats and inline-block style concerns.

Why do I claim that makes it worse? Because you wind up with more markup just to trick the layout engine to calculate where to put things. Instead of you just figuring it out largely on your own and not building a Rube Goldberg machine to layout a page.

Internally for a previous company, I did this only to have the next person try to get rid of absolute positioning because "gross". Over two sprints later they caved and went back to the working solution that was a) less code, b) worked everywhere, and c) was easy to modify by virtue of a.

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#69

Post by beat »

craftyguy wrote: post #44
beat wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in favor of this. My eyes aren't particularly bad, but I have to use reading glasses in order to read most computer text, and some can get really difficult. Larger fonts are better even for my bad-like-most-other-people-my-age eyes. The tiny text I would have found fine 20 years ago is painful now.

There's an easy fix for folks like yourself: most (all?) modern browsers support setting a minimum font size. Jack that up way into the double digits, and stop justifying ridiculously large font sizes for everyone.

Sure. Explain that to my mother.

Re: The easiest way to keep your web apps accessible: Just use text

#70

Post by vinceguidry »

traverseda wrote: post #61
vinceguidry wrote: post #37

Reading this article made me realize what it is that's broken about the concept of semantic markup and why websites even today are div soup. It's the same reason why divs won in the first place. You can't dictate the shape of a document to people and it be anything other than a kludge. Take the site I work on, Great Big Story[1]. We have sections and headers, but our content isn't defined by text, it's defined by gra…

Well, it's a problem of mixing data and visual elements. In a good model of the web, html is your data, css is your styling, and javascript doesn't really exist. In another model of the web, your data would be your data, html/css would work together to form a scene-graph. Javascript defines the relationship between your data and it's scene graph. That friction, are we using html as data or as part of our scene-graph,…

Thanks for introducing me to the concept of the scene-graph.

I tried to make an argument on a React community slack that components are purely visual, that they should express the visual structure of the web page, in the context of an argument over how state and props should be used.

He hated the rise of the Redux ecosystem, and I was trying to make the point that if you don't manage global state in your application sanely, you'll only end up reinventing it poorly, passing onChange across the Atlantic in the case where your save button doesn't live in the same visual space as the rest of your form.

His response was to bring up the Router component to make the point that not all components are visual.

UIs are complicated things, I've found that the visual model is the best encapsulation concept. Components aren't bad, but you need to first have a need to use them, because there's definitely a tradeoff, and second you need to use the right abstraction techniques. Routing components are a hack, different pages should just load different base components in the site backend.

But it seems like once someone swallows the functional paradigmatic koolaid, they lose all perspective to see when the paradigm fails to produce erudite design.

Post reply on HN