8 ms·

Everything is a button now that javascript applications have replaced HTML documents. And there are no such things as anchors or links anymore. They are not URL

Everything is a button now that javascript applications have replaced HTML documents. And there are no such things as anchors or links anymore. They are not URLs but instead triggers for more javascript execution. We're, unfortunately, well past this minor problem and onto much more serious ones that eclipse it.

chociej 6y ago
TBH I don't care too much what someone does with a button or link, but if hold Ctrl and it doesn't open in a new tab, I'm gonna be grumpy.
- Kelamir 6y ago
  Hold control to open links in new tabs?! Woah! That's so much better than using middle mouse button, which is just suffering. Thanks chociej :)
  - kaibee 6y ago
    I have one of those fancy gamer mice (Logitech G700S) and I bound the most prominent thumb button to middle-click. Haven't looked backed, making scroll-wheels clickable was a mistake.
    - hypertele-Xii 6y ago
      Scroll wheels themselves are a bad implementation of a good idea. I bought a cheap USB volume control knob and used AutoHotKey to rebind volume up/down events into wheel scrolls. Productivity increased like crazy! Scrolling is no longer a chore, it's a pleasure. I even went the extra mile and coated it with rubber for a good grip.
  - Ashanmaril 6y ago
    Why is a 2-handed input better than a 1-finger input?
    - marcosdumay 6y ago
      It certainly depends on your hardware. The GP is just rooted in a completely different experience than yours.
  - wussboy 6y ago
    I have always used Gesturefy to make right-click and drag down to open in a new tab. I don't know where I originally picked up this gesture...maybe Opera in 2003? But I've always loved it and use it a hundred times a day.
- jibbit 6y ago
  Twitter seems to have recently (partially) given up on <a> tags, meaning i can no longer right-click to open in a new tab - it is infuriating
  - anthk 6y ago
    https://nitter.net https://nitter.net
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      Chronically rate-limited, use an alternative. (I could mention one that works, but that will eventually of course just compound the problem. So my secret fishing spot remains secret ;-)
      - blewboarwastake 6y ago
        You can use this extension: https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect and use the "use a random instance" option
        dredmorbius 6y ago
        Thanks, useful.
- thitcanh 6y ago
  So you do care since only links follow your browsers’ behavior. Nothing else can be right-clicked to show “Copy link address” in the dropdown for example. The golden rule is that if a button opens a link to a page that has its own URL, it should be a plain anchor tag. You can apply whatever JavaScript on top of it to “ajaxify” it, as long as you ignore altered clicks (ctrl, cmd, shift, etc)
anhanhanh 6y ago
That's just not true. Well known and widely used libs such react-router are an evidence of that.
ehnto 6y ago
It's tricky to balance user expectations with semantic HTML now that the web has evolved so far. The easiest example I have from my industry is a product card in a grid of products. There really is no correct spot to link it in some designs, but the user expects to click any part of the box and be taken to the product page. So you wrap the whole box in an anchor tag, which has its own host of problems. As you said though, that is a bygone problem, this ship has sailed in the land of SPAs. Even a simple blog is an SPAs these days.
- ravenstine 6y ago
  User expectations, or executive expectations? In my experience, the effective expectations of users are remarkably low. If you were to survey users, you'd get the impression that users are very particular. In reality, users tolerate all sorts of things that most of us on HN would consider primitive or nearly broken. If most web applications actually relied mostly on constructs provided by the browser/DOM rather than JavaScript, the average user wouldn't notice or care. But there are product owners who power trip on the possibility that they too could be just like The Google, so they want everything to be unnecessarily animated and dynamic. On top of that, many of them want Silicon Valley programming at San Fernando Valley prices, so not only do they request that their web applications be unnecessarily complicated, but the junior devs they hire are given no direction and the code gets bloated, wrecking performance (which matters more than "delightful" UIs).
  - ehnto 6y ago
    I am entirely inclined to agree with you. It is definitely perpetuated by project stakeholders, even developers wanting to try new tech. But now that we have spent years training eCommerce user behaviours you do find that people will be busy clicking everything but the product title, arguably the most semantic place to put the anchor, so it may take a user a few goes to get where they're going. The user might not care but many of the project stakeholders do. While I am an evangelist of a utilitarian, semantic web, I feel it's an idealism that hasn't survived it's encounter with the real world in commercial software. We went from being worried about javascript image sliders being too heavy, to making the client compute and render the entire application, in about 8 years. I think the trajectory is clear, and I doubt we'll have a watershed moment where the whole tree of stakeholders suddenly wants less.
lunfard00 6y ago
In 2013 most people were happy with every new shiny app, and now that web is looking more and more like an app, is that an issue?
anchpop 6y ago
The FUD about SPAs and Javascript on HN is insane. Here's my personal site: https://chadnauseam.com/ https://chadnauseam.com/. It's a SPA. It loads fast. There are such things as anchors and link (inspect element if you like). They have URLs and you can ctrl-click to open in a new tab. (The biggest proble with it is that I've been playing around with some js to animate a fade-in effect on page load, and it seems a little laggy and makes the site not work with javascript disabled. If I can't fix those issues I'll probably remove that in a few days.)
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  Couldn’t you just do fade in with CSS?
- Ashanmaril 6y ago
  The Discord/Twitter "buttons" on your site actually highlight one of the issues here. You can't open them in a new tab, or hover to see where they're taking you. They also don't make the mouse react properly to being on something clickable (though that could be fixed with a `cursor: pointer` style)
  - tshaddox 6y ago
    Which is actually a clear illustration of the point: that you have to go out of your way to make "link-like" things that aren't actual links. Clearly whatever framework or rendering library the site is using supports client-side navigation via real working anchor tags. But for some reason, they decided to not use those for the social media widgets.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - frosted-flakes 6y ago
    Historically, only links got the pointer (hand) cursor, not all clickable things. Buttons and everything else kept the regular arrow cursor. Desktop software on all operating systems has always worked like this. However, this convention has been muddied a lot on the Web in the past few years, but I still like to follow it.
robertoandred 6y ago
You're not understanding the semantic and UX reasoning behind this article. JavaScript has no relevance to it at all.

chociej 6y ago

TBH I don't care too much what someone does with a button or link, but if hold Ctrl and it doesn't open in a new tab, I'm gonna be grumpy.

Kelamir 6y ago
Hold control to open links in new tabs?! Woah! That's so much better than using middle mouse button, which is just suffering. Thanks chociej :)
- kaibee 6y ago
  I have one of those fancy gamer mice (Logitech G700S) and I bound the most prominent thumb button to middle-click. Haven't looked backed, making scroll-wheels clickable was a mistake.
  - hypertele-Xii 6y ago
    Scroll wheels themselves are a bad implementation of a good idea. I bought a cheap USB volume control knob and used AutoHotKey to rebind volume up/down events into wheel scrolls. Productivity increased like crazy! Scrolling is no longer a chore, it's a pleasure. I even went the extra mile and coated it with rubber for a good grip.
- Ashanmaril 6y ago
  Why is a 2-handed input better than a 1-finger input?
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    It certainly depends on your hardware. The GP is just rooted in a completely different experience than yours.
- wussboy 6y ago
  I have always used Gesturefy to make right-click and drag down to open in a new tab. I don't know where I originally picked up this gesture...maybe Opera in 2003? But I've always loved it and use it a hundred times a day.
jibbit 6y ago
Twitter seems to have recently (partially) given up on <a> tags, meaning i can no longer right-click to open in a new tab - it is infuriating
- anthk 6y ago
  https://nitter.net https://nitter.net
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Chronically rate-limited, use an alternative. (I could mention one that works, but that will eventually of course just compound the problem. So my secret fishing spot remains secret ;-)
    - blewboarwastake 6y ago
      You can use this extension: https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect and use the "use a random instance" option
      - dredmorbius 6y ago
        Thanks, useful.
thitcanh 6y ago
So you do care since only links follow your browsers’ behavior. Nothing else can be right-clicked to show “Copy link address” in the dropdown for example. The golden rule is that if a button opens a link to a page that has its own URL, it should be a plain anchor tag. You can apply whatever JavaScript on top of it to “ajaxify” it, as long as you ignore altered clicks (ctrl, cmd, shift, etc)

anhanhanh 6y ago

That's just not true. Well known and widely used libs such react-router are an evidence of that.

ehnto 6y ago

It's tricky to balance user expectations with semantic HTML now that the web has evolved so far. The easiest example I have from my industry is a product card in a grid of products. There really is no correct spot to link it in some designs, but the user expects to click any part of the box and be taken to the product page. So you wrap the whole box in an anchor tag, which has its own host of problems. As you said though, that is a bygone problem, this ship has sailed in the land of SPAs. Even a simple blog is an SPAs these days.

ravenstine 6y ago
User expectations, or executive expectations? In my experience, the effective expectations of users are remarkably low. If you were to survey users, you'd get the impression that users are very particular. In reality, users tolerate all sorts of things that most of us on HN would consider primitive or nearly broken. If most web applications actually relied mostly on constructs provided by the browser/DOM rather than JavaScript, the average user wouldn't notice or care. But there are product owners who power trip on the possibility that they too could be just like The Google, so they want everything to be unnecessarily animated and dynamic. On top of that, many of them want Silicon Valley programming at San Fernando Valley prices, so not only do they request that their web applications be unnecessarily complicated, but the junior devs they hire are given no direction and the code gets bloated, wrecking performance (which matters more than "delightful" UIs).
- ehnto 6y ago
  I am entirely inclined to agree with you. It is definitely perpetuated by project stakeholders, even developers wanting to try new tech. But now that we have spent years training eCommerce user behaviours you do find that people will be busy clicking everything but the product title, arguably the most semantic place to put the anchor, so it may take a user a few goes to get where they're going. The user might not care but many of the project stakeholders do. While I am an evangelist of a utilitarian, semantic web, I feel it's an idealism that hasn't survived it's encounter with the real world in commercial software. We went from being worried about javascript image sliders being too heavy, to making the client compute and render the entire application, in about 8 years. I think the trajectory is clear, and I doubt we'll have a watershed moment where the whole tree of stakeholders suddenly wants less.

lunfard00 6y ago

In 2013 most people were happy with every new shiny app, and now that web is looking more and more like an app, is that an issue?

anchpop 6y ago

The FUD about SPAs and Javascript on HN is insane. Here's my personal site: https://chadnauseam.com/ https://chadnauseam.com/. It's a SPA. It loads fast. There are such things as anchors and link (inspect element if you like). They have URLs and you can ctrl-click to open in a new tab. (The biggest proble with it is that I've been playing around with some js to animate a fade-in effect on page load, and it seems a little laggy and makes the site not work with javascript disabled. If I can't fix those issues I'll probably remove that in a few days.)

bobthepanda 6y ago
Couldn’t you just do fade in with CSS?
Ashanmaril 6y ago
The Discord/Twitter "buttons" on your site actually highlight one of the issues here. You can't open them in a new tab, or hover to see where they're taking you. They also don't make the mouse react properly to being on something clickable (though that could be fixed with a `cursor: pointer` style)
- tshaddox 6y ago
  Which is actually a clear illustration of the point: that you have to go out of your way to make "link-like" things that aren't actual links. Clearly whatever framework or rendering library the site is using supports client-side navigation via real working anchor tags. But for some reason, they decided to not use those for the social media widgets.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- frosted-flakes 6y ago
  Historically, only links got the pointer (hand) cursor, not all clickable things. Buttons and everything else kept the regular arrow cursor. Desktop software on all operating systems has always worked like this. However, this convention has been muddied a lot on the Web in the past few years, but I still like to follow it.

robertoandred 6y ago

You're not understanding the semantic and UX reasoning behind this article. JavaScript has no relevance to it at all.