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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

#71

Post by cytzol »

dessant wrote: post #11

The redesigned version of Google Search that is being A/B tested no longer shows links. Despite being a developer, I'm anxious to click search results, especially because when results are filtered to be from the last day or week, they are full of phishing sites and pages with scraped content that immediately redirect to malware. This change can't possibly be beneficial to users. It makes people even more ignorant abo…

I'm in this A/B test too, and like you, it makes me anxious. I've become so accustomed to looking at the full URL (in green) of what I'm about to click on, that without having it there, I trust Google search results less as a whole.

The one that got me was when a search result pointed me to a site that was something like:

    example.com/?ipaddr=10.3.4.3
And Google, in an attempt to be helpful, showed me this:

    example.com > ...
> It makes people even more ignorant about the technologies they depend on, and exposes them to further risk of being exploited.

This is the point. If you've ever viewed an AMP site using Mobile Safari, you'll still see "google.com" in the Location Bar, instead of the site's own domain name. Google's fix for this is to try to kill the URL.

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

#74

Post by linusnext »

From JWZ.org

Greetings, Lynx users. There is a reason this page doesn't use ALT tags on the images. The reason is that the bozos responsible for both MSIE and Netscape Confusicator 4.0 decided that they would display the ALT tags of images every time you move the mouse over them -- even if the images are loaded, and even if they are not links. The ALT attribute to the IMG tag is supposed to be used instead of the image, not in addition to the image.

This looks absolutely terrible, so I don't use ALT tags any more in self-defense.

If they wanted to implemented tooltips, they should have used the TITLE attribute to the A tag. That's in the HTML 1.2 spec and everything.

I had to decide between making this page look good for the vast majority of viewers, or making it be readable by the miniscule minority of you stuck in the 70s. Those of you in the retro contingent lost. Sorry.

from view-source:https://web.archive.org/web/20000304020552/http://www.jwz.or...

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

#75

Post by UncleMeat »

dotancohen wrote: post #59
ppod wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mistake you are making is that you are trying to answer the question of what the average user wants by looking at what you want. Developers are not representative of users.

A faster horse. People value privacy when made aware of the issue, but very few people are aware of how websites track (and manipulate) them.

I feel like this claim needs support.

All of the studies I'm aware of that ask people to choose between different price points based on privacy end up showing minimal valuing of privacy.

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

#76

Post by gordaco »

dessant wrote: post #11

The redesigned version of Google Search that is being A/B tested no longer shows links. Despite being a developer, I'm anxious to click search results, especially because when results are filtered to be from the last day or week, they are full of phishing sites and pages with scraped content that immediately redirect to malware. This change can't possibly be beneficial to users. It makes people even more ignorant abo…

I got this crap on my work PC, and it was the last straw for me. I've switched to duckduckgo (to train myself, what I did was actually change my dynamic bookmark, so that when I type "google X" it goes to the duckduckgo search page for X instead of google, as it used to do). This morning I tried entering google and it's showing the domains again, but I don't care any more, they've lost me.

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

#77

Post by theandrewbailey »

fanf2 wrote: post #62
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. :(

I think it is because in html4 the content of an element is restricted to inline elements, whereas in html5 is transparent so its content can be block elements if its parent allows them.

That would explain why my blog is terribly broken in lynx. The links from my category pages to article pages are usually done with ..., which breaks the in lynx.

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

#78

Post by javajosh »

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 agree with you on all points - I think we're just speaking past each other. I'm speaking about the platform, and you're speaking about applications. The applications written for the web today are exactly as you say; the browser platform itself, however, is quite extraordinary and I remain deeply impressed with it.

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

#79

Post by mst »

SilasX wrote: post #47
normalnorm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defaulting to simple HTML allows one to support all incredibly niche browser. That is the beauty of protocols and standards. This is particularly relevant when it comes to accessibility. Google search results are literally lists of web links, so this is absolutely doable. They don't do it because they are more preoccupied with extracting data about their users than they are about accessibility, and yes, this includes…

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.)

I actually think this a great example of the Curb Cut effect, where accessibility features that are vitally important to one group of people (wrt curb cuts, wheelchair users) also provide broad benefits to many others (wrt curb cuts, one example would beparents with small children in strollers).

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

#80

Post by chipotle_coyote »

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…

> most users actually prefer visually fancier content with pictures and colors.

You're aware that pure HTML and CSS alone can produce visually fancy content with pictures and colors, right? It honestly seems like a lot of web developers are starting to forget this, but it's true, I swear. My personal web site (https://coyotetracks.org/) is minimalist by design, but it has accent colors, custom fonts, Retina-ready images, and that silly little fade in and out when you hover over links, all without any JavaScript whatsoever. Also: turns out it works pretty well on Lynx!

I think JS gets a bit of a bad rap these days and am willing to leap to its defense even though I don't like it much as a language, but a huge chunk of the reason it has a bad rap is because people do bad things with it, by which I mean either malicious things or just unnecessary things. An awful lot of modern web sites could run just fine with far, far fewer scripts than they're deploying.

(And, yes, I can even do web analytics without JavaScript, because there are these things called "server logs" I can analyze with utilities like GoAccess.)

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