PatternFly: An open source design system
patternfly.org
patternfly.org
"When you represent the date as a numeric value or label, use MM-DD-YYYY."
possibly the dumbest date format known to man. ISO 8601 for time format is eschewed, but they do go on to make a gesture towards internationalisation with:
"Use a currency's ISO three-digit numeric code when writing for computerized systems or for countries that don't use Latin scripts."
(That's ISO 4217 for all the standards buffs.)
For all their talk about accessibility they go out of their way to make basic input as inaccessible as possible.
Remember how Google needed a user study with 600 people to arrive at common sense conclusion that text input has to look like text input? (And sti failed to make it be that) Yeah
"Oh, why don't we make it just a white field on a white background with just an underlines and perhaps invisible light gray borders. And for disabled state we'll make it an unreadable gray on gray"
You see it everywhere. That 600 people study that Google did for Material Design? It's infuriating, through and through: "Enclosed text fields with a rectangular (box) shape performed better than those with a line affordance" https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-d...
Compare and contrast with people who actually think about these things: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/text-input/
Gov.uk is a government site that has to accessible to absolutely everyone, including tech-illiterate users. It also has a comparatively low density.
No. It's not the job of the user to make thin near-invisible lines or gray-on-gray text legible
> Gov.uk is a government site that has to accessible to absolutely everyone,
Exactly. And how is this a bad thing?
I think the "Increase Contrast" setting on MacOS does exactly what you want. The one in Windows 11 also seems quite decent. Maybe if you try it out, you'll realize why it isn't the default.
> how is [the uncompromising accessibility of Gov.uk] a bad thing?
It only works because of it's low density. There's very little consideration for hierarchy or depth.
That it works for majority of users has to be proven
> I think the "Increase Contrast" setting
Will do nothing for nearly invisible lines or dark gray on slightly darker gray in the text input "designs"
> It only works because of it's low density.
That the PatternFly design will work at "high density" for some undefined definition if high density also has to be proven.
Like Google, you may want to conduct a user study with 600 people to give you some common sense
https://www.patternfly.org/v4/components/text-area/#textarea
Worse than most inputs, it had the audacity to sling you back to the start if you look at it the wrong way while trying to scroll right.
Formerly PatternFly was rather RedHat specific but it looks like they've spin-off the RedHat parts and made PatternFly general purpose (which is great ofcourse).
IIRC, Patternfly started many years ago, because many open source project (of Red Hat interest), had inconsistent ui. The idea was to develop a common guideline that other open source projects could use and be somewhat consistent with each other. To have a framework, artwork and guidelines that would be available on permissive terms forever.
Since red hat now belongs to ibm and patternfly is from red hat ans rhe carbon design system is from ibm i wonder which one will stay!?
In their original iteration they had to do a study with 600 people to find out that text inputs should look like text inputs: https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-d.... (Edit: and their text fields by default still don't look like text fields, you have to specifically set them to `outlined`)
Their latest abomination has almost nothing aligned optically: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1643607965935476737 When there are 5 elements, they follow 5 different guidelines: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1643682248959328258