6 ms·
A web page’s behavior should be independent of any particular styling of the hierarchical elements used to represent the document it’s presenting. Just like an
by eschaton 2y ago
A web page’s behavior should be independent of any particular styling of the hierarchical elements used to represent the document it’s presenting.
Just like any web page should work perfectly with JavaScript disabled, it should work perfectly with a user-supplied style sheet.
If you’re making a web page that has this problem, what you’re making should not be a web page, and you should feel bad about the choices that led you to that point in your life.
It will take a while to fix this problem in our industry since we’ve waited so long on it, but the best time to start is now.
- grandempire 2y ago> Just like any web page should work perfectly with JavaScript disabled And the problem is neither of those things are true in reality. So in real life a change like this can cost the economy millions of dollars.
- eschaton 2y agoSure they are, they’re just not sexy. And making this change will ultimately save orders of magnitude more than the cost.
- grandempire 2y agoThere are real websites people rely on that don’t work without JavaScript - and ones that depend on the h1 size too.
- eschaton 2y agoAnd that’s a bad thing, and the people involved in making those sites should feel bad and do something about their mistakes rather than just shrug. And we should call them what they are: Mistakes, abuses of the web.
- toast0 2y agoSure, the people making these things should feel bad about it, and ideally change their choices... But if 5% of Firefox users can't use your page, and your page is important, they'll consider Firefox broken and go use something else. Firefox isn't doing so well on market share, and appearing to be broken isn't going to help.
- moring 2y agoYou have now stated that "those people should feel bad" for the second time. Personal attacks will hardly bring any change into this world. I'd instead suggest that you propose actual ways to solve the same problems that Javascript-based SPAs have solved which the non-JS web is still stuck with.
- psychoslave 2y agoJust add a matter of precision, personal attacks won't generally improve the world on the overwhole aftermaths. But they do generally change the world into a less pleasant place to live in.
- grandempire 2y agoAnd you are failing to observe a difference between what should happen and what has actually happened. Changing the latter costs money - time from people’s lives.
- bowsamic 2y ago> And that’s a bad thing Why? You’ve given no argument that this actually is “abuse”
- mvdtnz 2y agoI made a web game that's simply not possible without js. Is it your contention the it simply shouldn't exist? Lots of people seem to enjoy it and I think they'd be disappointed.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- econ 2y agoI got stuck trying that. To facilitate non JS by default my products are checkboxes and the checkout button submits the form (it is a spa). This works well but navigating back the user is presented with an "error" page asking if they want to submit the form again. Is there a solution for that?
- savolai 2y agoI have done this in projects with POST forms: ”To avoid the resubmit warning when hitting back, use the Post/Redirect/Get pattern: after a POST, redirect with a 303 to a normal GET page. The browser skips saving the POST in history, so back just takes you to the form without complaining.”
- zdragnar 2y agoThe usual way to deal with it is to respond to form submissions with an HTTP redirect to another page. The user can still hit the back button, but the scary popup won't occur. However, you run the risk of the user re-submitting the form anyway. Since this is involving orders and money, you may want the order confirmation / submit page to have a nonce or temporary ID representing the checkout session in the URL such that, upon revisiting that page, you can lookup the order status on the backend and redirect them to the order success page again.
- moring 2y agoThis will prevent re-submission but still be confusing for the user. Why even allow submitting when navigating back? If the order has been submitted already, the submit button should be greyed out with a message saying that the order has been submitted already. The original task was to do this without JS, so my first guess would be: Instruct the browser to re-load the page upon navigating back (cacheability headers), identify the order using an ID in the URL, then when reloading detect its already-submitted state on the server.
- hiddencost 2y agoAt a certain point in your career you start realizing how little that is.
- grandempire 2y agoActually the more I’ve gone in my career the more I’ve realized we underestimate the cost of changes. Getting vendors to change a single line of code can be incredible amounts of money.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tshaddox 2y ago> If you’re making a web page that has this problem, what you’re making should not be a web page, and you should feel bad about the choices that led you to that point in your life. The web is explicitly and intentionally a software distribution platform. JavaScript is a web standard and is no less “part of the web” than HTML and CSS. You’re f
- bowsamic 2y agoAnd what is your proposed alternative? A bunch of native apps? Qt?
- eschaton 2y agoYes, apps, which web pages aren’t no matter how much web designers want to pretend they are.
- bowsamic 2y agoThey actually are though, in reality. Your point is what should they be, not what they actually are. The truth of the situation is that webpages _actually are_ applications now, due to the new features the browsers have added to facilitate that I actually work at Qt and many of our new products are web apps
- eschaton 2y agoThat’s too bad, but not unexpected given that Qt’s itself a non-native toolkit anywhere other than Linux that developers on those other platforms shouldn’t touch.
- bowsamic 2y agoOkay so you actually have no cross platform suggestion??
- eschaton 2y agoCross-platform frameworks are inevitably crap. If you really need to run an application on multiple platforms, write a cross-platform core and implement the human interface atop it for each platform using each platform’s native frameworks and languages. The result is always a better product with happier users. If you don’t want to invest in that, you should at minimum be willing to admit to yourself that you’re OK with giving your users something subpar because it’s to your advantage to do so.
- wruza 2y agoThe fix is called reset.css. Allows you to skip headlines like subj and only emotionally react to the "but you already have an app platform, it's web, shtupid" and "you should feel bad about your choices" split around your practical needs.
- codedokode 2y agoAwful thing. You can recognize sites using it by missing margins in lists etc.
- ryandrake 2y agoYes, the user should ultimately have the final say about what colors, fonts, and sizes are used by their browser. We've handed way too much control over to the web developers. Web sites don't have to be pixel perfect. If I want to render text using Comic Sans by default, that shouldn't "break" anything.
- echelon 2y ago> We've handed way too much control over to the web developers. We lost this battle by 1999. And again when we started to deliver full web applications instead of documents. I wish we had a second protocol that was more document and information focused. Something that gave zero control over programming or layout to providers. I just want to exchange information P2P in a dense swarm approximating modern social media. I want to use my own client configured how I like it to choose what to ingest and how to flag it and present it.
- Incipient 2y ago>Something that gave zero control over programming or layout to providers. Without layout or programming (functionality)...is that not just json?? And if you consider "structure" to be "layout"...then...a txt file? Unf I don't see the point here. You're basically just describing an api endpoint and a custom client.
- iamsaitam 2y ago"you should feel bad about the choices that led you to that point in your life" - I suggest you find help to deal with the bitterness you have inside of you.
- eschaton 2y agoI suggest you examine the state of the industry and the garbage that’s passed off as reasonable these days and ask yourself whether what you perceive in my comments is bitterness.
- moring 2y agoThe garbage that dominates the web has everything to do with centralization of power, and nothing with HTML vs JS. The former is a people problem and the latter is just tech.