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This blog doesn’t touch on the actual issue at hand: businesses make business decisions, not engineering decisions. It’s easy to enumerate a bunch of technical

This blog doesn’t touch on the actual issue at hand: businesses make business decisions, not engineering decisions. It’s easy to enumerate a bunch of technical asks and then blame their absence on technical reasons, because it doesn’t require any exploration of the business details. It stays in a nice, safe realm. To be clear, I personally agree with, and want every single item listed in this blog. I’m a big nerd. But I also recognize that I’m nowhere near anything resembling a typical user. What I want is probably not even on the radar of 99% of users of these websites. It’s easy to say, “I want X and having X would make me a happier user.” The real question is, “is implementing X an appropriate expenditure of resources if the goal is to build a profitable business?” Usually not. Most users don’t know or don’t care about X. Be careful with the nerd echo chamber we live in that makes us think these things matter to the common person. For all of this, one could argue, “yeah but they’re being foolish. Long term this is going to bite them.” You might be right! I think you’re right, too. But that’s a business position, not a technical one.

kijin 3y ago
For many businesses, there's a simple incentive that should make them care: SEO. Although Google and other search engines have said for more than a decade that their bots can execute javascript and navigate SPAs, the truth is that they are not going to simulate a click on every random element with onClick events attached. In many cases, they will not even execute any javascript. Even in 2023, <a href="URL"> is the best way to make search engines pay attention. Popular frontend development patterns have also made it nearly impossible to figure out the semantic structure of a page. Everything is a <div> now. But if you care about how your website looks in a search result, you might still want to designate some parts of the page as <main> or <article> and other parts as <aside> or <nav>. This is especially important if your website contains short user-generated snippets (like tweets) along with a lot of auxiliary information, as semantic tags make it easier for search engines to determine what the main content of each URL is. In short, many websites would still benefit from enforcing proper semantic markup, like we used to do in the good ol' days of the "no tables for layout" crusade. Now if the business doesn't care about SEO at all (an increasingly common attitude as websites become app-ified), there's always the atomic option: talk to the legal department about the possible consequences of ignoring accessibility.
Julesman 3y ago
Someone those businesses hired sold them on shortcuts that are just bad. Trading UX for production speed isn't a thing. Claiming bad UX is a business decision isn't a thing. Bad UX is bad for business. Sure, some of these concerns aren't as important as others. But generally speaking, the idea that saving time on development at the expense of observing very basic UI conventions is just silly.
megous 3y ago
> is implementing X an appropriate expenditure of resources Lot of these things just require devs to not actively try to damage the usability of the defaults. It costs money to break the basics that work for free: - missing keyboard focus indicator? yeah, dev had to go out of his way to remove it, instead of just doing nothing and focusing on the job/content - can't paste into inputs? someone had to think about preventing this and implemented it - ctrl+k / ctrl+f is broken? it works if you just write you page and do nothing extra! - page is blank for people with JS disabled? someone wasted money on a person who had to learn a whole damn programming language and multi-billion dollar company's framework instead of just html/css
cratermoon 3y ago
> businesses make business decisions, not engineering decisions. And that's how we get things like the 737Max

kijin 3y ago

For many businesses, there's a simple incentive that should make them care: SEO. Although Google and other search engines have said for more than a decade that their bots can execute javascript and navigate SPAs, the truth is that they are not going to simulate a click on every random element with onClick events attached. In many cases, they will not even execute any javascript. Even in 2023, <a href="URL"> is the best way to make search engines pay attention. Popular frontend development patterns have also made it nearly impossible to figure out the semantic structure of a page. Everything is a <div> now. But if you care about how your website looks in a search result, you might still want to designate some parts of the page as <main> or <article> and other parts as <aside> or <nav>. This is especially important if your website contains short user-generated snippets (like tweets) along with a lot of auxiliary information, as semantic tags make it easier for search engines to determine what the main content of each URL is. In short, many websites would still benefit from enforcing proper semantic markup, like we used to do in the good ol' days of the "no tables for layout" crusade. Now if the business doesn't care about SEO at all (an increasingly common attitude as websites become app-ified), there's always the atomic option: talk to the legal department about the possible consequences of ignoring accessibility.

Julesman 3y ago

Someone those businesses hired sold them on shortcuts that are just bad. Trading UX for production speed isn't a thing. Claiming bad UX is a business decision isn't a thing. Bad UX is bad for business. Sure, some of these concerns aren't as important as others. But generally speaking, the idea that saving time on development at the expense of observing very basic UI conventions is just silly.

megous 3y ago

> is implementing X an appropriate expenditure of resources Lot of these things just require devs to not actively try to damage the usability of the defaults. It costs money to break the basics that work for free: - missing keyboard focus indicator? yeah, dev had to go out of his way to remove it, instead of just doing nothing and focusing on the job/content - can't paste into inputs? someone had to think about preventing this and implemented it - ctrl+k / ctrl+f is broken? it works if you just write you page and do nothing extra! - page is blank for people with JS disabled? someone wasted money on a person who had to learn a whole damn programming language and multi-billion dollar company's framework instead of just html/css

cratermoon 3y ago

> businesses make business decisions, not engineering decisions. And that's how we get things like the 737Max