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> Thats because CSS is not powerful enough This kind of objection is totally missing the point. And this isn't an argument that CSS doesn't have painful limit

> Thats because CSS is not powerful enough This kind of objection is totally missing the point. And this isn't an argument that CSS doesn't have painful limits (it does) or even about what constitutes "enough" (within its limits, CSS offers enough possibilities that your own ideas of what the app "should" be like may be as much as a limit as the problems of CSS are). The power of CSS is largely orthogonal to the underlying issue. Ideally, your web site/app is still usable even with every last stylesheet completely ignored. It should work with Lynx, or with entirely non-visual user agents (screenreaders, search bots, Siri etc). CSS should enhance via layout and other presentation rules where that's possible. JS should provide more convenient application behavior where that's possible. Instead, we've slipped into a space where the browser (and, frequently enough, one browser) is simply considered The VM That Lived™, just another runtime target. And that's a sign of its growing power, and that power isn't a bad thing because there are in fact some applications that don't fit the hypermedia model well and the browser's ability to play the just another runtime role opens a space for them. But the rush to get into that space is considerably overdone and apparently executed without a lot of awareness of what's been lost in moving that way.

softawre 10y ago
If my users care about and/or use Lynx that I will support it. Until then, it's just a feature that doesn't have the ROI to invest in.
- wwweston 10y ago
  Sure, sometimes you have to make tradeoffs for what you have time to invest in. But this isn't really about supporting the world's Lynx users specifically. There's a reason I put a whole class of non-mainstream UAs in there (and in particular Siri, given how likely it is that entirely non-visual UAs are to become more mainstream at some point, perhaps soon, on top of the awareness that intermediary UAs like GoogleBot are of course ubiquitous and clearly important). And which UAs you try to support has a chicken and egg effect on which UAs get employed as intermediaries in accessing your site/app... and therefore which UAs you think you see using it. Usage follows accessibility perhaps even more surely than accomodation follows demand. If that weren't enough, the decision to do the things that would mean that your site is usable in Lynx is not just a feature -- it's also a technical decision. And like other technical decisions (database, language, library, application architecture, idioms and patterns you use, and data serialization/interchange format... which is actually part of what this decision actually is), it matters to how well your product performs and how tractable it is to develop and maintain, as well as how widely it can be consumed. If you're having to make cold hard decisions about ROI for features, chances are decent that you're better off for thinking about whether it works in Lynx and why, even if not one single user visits with that specific UA.
- PavlovsCat 10y ago
  Fair enough in a way, but on the other hand.. will that be like JPEG2000, which browsers might support when websites use it, which might be when browsers support it? Or put differently, how would someone who can't use or even see your thing become your user?
agentdrtran 10y ago
Except the vast, vast majority of people don't care and use a normal desktop browser with JS on
- fucking_tragedy 10y ago
  My mom just bought a new phone and asks why it's still too slow and clunky like her old one. I found out she likes to click Buzzfeed-esque links from Facebook and most of those sites slow the device to a crawl because of the massive amounts of Javascript running. People care about the downstream effects, they don't know the how or why, but they care.
  - kitsunesoba 10y ago
    Indeed. I think it’s important for engineers working on any kind of end-user facing software to remember that a lot of people aren’t using cutting edge or even recent hardware. There’s lots of Core 2 Duo laptops and 3+ year old smartphones floating around in use out there and their users need to be able to use the websites and apps we make as much as the guy who buys new everything every year. I think this is particularly easy to forget for those of us living in tech hubs where everyone is using almost-new Macbook Pros and iPhone 6Ss.
    - kirkdouglas 10y ago
      +1 I've never seen that client devs test their apps on lower end devices.
  - smoe 10y ago
    In 2014 I bought a ~50$ Android while traveling Latin America. I didn't expect much more of the browsing experience than reading mostly text based articles. But I didn't even get that. Literally half the linked articles I clicked on hacker news led to sites which where close to or impossible to navigate because of JS shenanigans and the assumption of an least a 4G internet connection. It is especially annoying if one claims to target a world audience, but expects them to have a +500$ phones and vast data subscriptions.

softawre 10y ago

If my users care about and/or use Lynx that I will support it. Until then, it's just a feature that doesn't have the ROI to invest in.

wwweston 10y ago
Sure, sometimes you have to make tradeoffs for what you have time to invest in. But this isn't really about supporting the world's Lynx users specifically. There's a reason I put a whole class of non-mainstream UAs in there (and in particular Siri, given how likely it is that entirely non-visual UAs are to become more mainstream at some point, perhaps soon, on top of the awareness that intermediary UAs like GoogleBot are of course ubiquitous and clearly important). And which UAs you try to support has a chicken and egg effect on which UAs get employed as intermediaries in accessing your site/app... and therefore which UAs you think you see using it. Usage follows accessibility perhaps even more surely than accomodation follows demand. If that weren't enough, the decision to do the things that would mean that your site is usable in Lynx is not just a feature -- it's also a technical decision. And like other technical decisions (database, language, library, application architecture, idioms and patterns you use, and data serialization/interchange format... which is actually part of what this decision actually is), it matters to how well your product performs and how tractable it is to develop and maintain, as well as how widely it can be consumed. If you're having to make cold hard decisions about ROI for features, chances are decent that you're better off for thinking about whether it works in Lynx and why, even if not one single user visits with that specific UA.
PavlovsCat 10y ago
Fair enough in a way, but on the other hand.. will that be like JPEG2000, which browsers might support when websites use it, which might be when browsers support it? Or put differently, how would someone who can't use or even see your thing become your user?

agentdrtran 10y ago

Except the vast, vast majority of people don't care and use a normal desktop browser with JS on

fucking_tragedy 10y ago
My mom just bought a new phone and asks why it's still too slow and clunky like her old one. I found out she likes to click Buzzfeed-esque links from Facebook and most of those sites slow the device to a crawl because of the massive amounts of Javascript running. People care about the downstream effects, they don't know the how or why, but they care.
- kitsunesoba 10y ago
  Indeed. I think it’s important for engineers working on any kind of end-user facing software to remember that a lot of people aren’t using cutting edge or even recent hardware. There’s lots of Core 2 Duo laptops and 3+ year old smartphones floating around in use out there and their users need to be able to use the websites and apps we make as much as the guy who buys new everything every year. I think this is particularly easy to forget for those of us living in tech hubs where everyone is using almost-new Macbook Pros and iPhone 6Ss.
  - kirkdouglas 10y ago
    +1 I've never seen that client devs test their apps on lower end devices.
- smoe 10y ago
  In 2014 I bought a ~50$ Android while traveling Latin America. I didn't expect much more of the browsing experience than reading mostly text based articles. But I didn't even get that. Literally half the linked articles I clicked on hacker news led to sites which where close to or impossible to navigate because of JS shenanigans and the assumption of an least a 4G internet connection. It is especially annoying if one claims to target a world audience, but expects them to have a +500$ phones and vast data subscriptions.