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Comment by kulahan | Hacker News Reader

It feels like every week someone discovers that code closer to the metal is faster, and ignores the fact that it’s easier to write higher-level code, and that this is the specific tradeoff everyone is making. Why do these articles keep getting posted? Who is this a revelation to?

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I don't think of HTML as low level, and I don't think that writing "high-level" web (whatever that is? React?) would be any faster to develop or produce better results for his example.

If you looked at the gov.uk page [1] that he linked, it is clean and readable. It doesn't look hard to me to make, and I don't think it is lacking functionality.

I'll grant that writing web-apps without a framework is going to be harder for many people (especially with all the fancy features that are expected now days), but that is not the point of this writing. This is an argument that the web (especially government services) should be usable on limited devices too.

1 https://www.gov.uk/housing-benefit

The article and commenters are both complaining about JS in favor of HTML - I'm really just talking about it in this context.

Anyways, I disagree with the idea that we should make something simple enough for PSPs and car browsers. Just go to a library.

You clearly took the lesson on board didn’t you.

What a depressingly elitist and exclusionary view. The modern web browser contains all the technology right there to make fast, maximally-accessible websites and even some “app”-like things, but nah you can’t be bothered, screw the less-fortunate. Would you want to “just go to a library” instead of use the device you already have? I strongly doubt it.

“Go to a public library” is elitist? I am on my hands and knees begging you to reconsider this position. I cannot imagine a worse take.

Public libraries are great and there should be a lot more of them and everyone should enjoy them, but they should absolutely not be a substitute for respectful, accessible web design and engineering. The elitism is that only people with the shiniest new devices should get to use your website on their terms.

I guarantee libraries do not have the shiniest new devices. So trying so hard to be offended.

You are either refusing to address the central point or your reading comprehension needs a lot of work. A premise of your original post was that libraries have newer devices than some users. I maintain that libraries should not have to be a fallback for your crappy website.

Right, and I’m positing that you don’t need to support 20 year old devices that receive zero updates because everyone has access to libraries in an absolute last resort.

There are limited resources when developing software. This is a pretty bad resource sink.

There are types of software for which I’d largely agree with you. Websites are not one of them: it takes effort or incompetence to make them slow and inaccessible.

Like 99.998% of software problems are due to incompetence. What’s your point? That government software is somehow immune to this problem or something?

You seem to agree with me, but refuse to admit it because you wish the world was different. I do too, but it’s pretty irrelevant.

My point is that websites are particularly amenable to being cheaply built in a fast and accessible way. I would say classes of, say, macOS apps are similar. Government certainly should be insulated from at least the market pressures that push websites into being slow and inaccessible. Competence is more a roll of the dice, I’ll grant you, but I’m not as pessimistic as you on that.

If we were talking about JS or Python or something, I’d agree with you. Most people just don’t have expert-tier knowledge of pure HTML, and even if they do, they’re slower to develop. I could get a feature out today to 99.9% of my desperate users, or I could get it out to 99.99% by waiting another two weeks. It just makes no sense. It has nothing to do with pessimism and everything to do with economics.

Sorry, I don’t buy it. There’s nothing “expert-tier” about plain accessible HTML, and with LLMs, there’s even less excuse. I’m not primarily a frontend web engineer and I can manage it.

Yes, I’m certain you can “manage it” despite not considering things like screen readers, page layout reversals, mobile responsiveness, working with legacy codebases that are 30 years old (when was the last time YOU had to update a site that simply must shut down every night for processing?), etc.

Everything looks easier from the outside. Maybe we should focus on getting private corps to provide a small amount of accessibility before forcing onerous requirements on our already-underpaid civil servants?

We're talking about governmental document-like websites with relatively simple forms here, not your particular legacy web app, there is no excuse for not getting them right. Gov.UK did. Plain HTML, used in a straight-forward way that is very clear from the approachable documentation on, say, MDN, is already responsive, readily consumable by screen readers, and works with any backend that already exists. If you have to fix a mess left by someone else you have my sympathy - I've been there too. But the original post is appealing to people who have a choice between plain, standard-use HTML, and any alternatives. And yes, I'm all for much harsher penalties for private companies that produce inaccessible web sites/apps too.

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