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Comment by gryfft | Hacker News Reader

The web needs more sites hosting raw .html pages formatted as plain text decorated with ASCII art with zero regard for mobile. I say this with complete sincerity.

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You can support mobile with ASCII art if you render at different widths and use a HTML+CSS wrapper for media-queries! I have a whole proposal about this: https://gwern.net/utext

Love the thinking here. Thanks for the research and suggestions.

It's not even that much of a problem for me on mobile after zooming out just a tad. The green on black is really what makes this page for me.

No cookies, no frameworks (no JS at all really), plain unobfuscated html. Amazing!

Still waiting for an LLM to communicate exclusively in this format.

What about accessibility?

That's what 8-bit text to speech was for, played from the PC Speaker for maximum effect. It sounded like Stephen Hawking choking on vodka, but that somehow fit the mood.

> It sounded like Stephen Hawking choking on vodka

I'm probably way, way overthinking this, but this seems philosophically quite deep and interesting, much like "what is the sound of one hand clapping" (ignoring Bart Simpson's masterful destruction of the ancient question).

Looking forward to your zine publication.

Wouldn't raw html be better for accessibility than a JS framework? Saying this as a non-front end dev.

Raw HTML: potentially. Big blocks of undifferentiated ASCII art: no.

  aria-hidden=true

Not present on the page in question, though.

If done correctly it doesn’t matter. SSR can yield an accessible HTML page and you won’t notice the difference. Client-side JS can adapt the web site to your needs -a personalization that is hard to achieve in static.

When was the last time... Or rather, when have you ever seen a framework-based page with accessibility done correctly?

I have seen many sites scoring well on various accessibility metrics. There’s no inherent technical limitation of frameworks that would make accessibility impossible, even when dealing with text to speech. We will see many more next year with EAA coming into effect (and many European companies do care about compliance).

Despite regulation I don’t Believe it will actually get implemented even governments have regulations around audio accessibility for education in particular, for years now, and still nothing moves.

Accessibility of this page is pretty bad as far as I can tell, but not because it's plain HTML. And if I understand correctly you can mark ASCII art as an image (role="img") with alternative text too.

Not everyone has to access everything.

Oooh good point. W3c accounts for it, and it's not that tough. Just a case of putting in the raw html:

https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/H86.html

Fuck accessibility. We're hackers, if it was hard to write, it should be hard to read.

Use HTMX.

HTMX is cool but not necessary for static html pages..

I prefer to use HTMX in place of other frameworks, but if you don't need a framework at all, even better!

Sorry :(

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