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Comment by zamadatix | Hacker News Reader

100k prize announcement for a competition right up a HN writer's alley and the top discussion on it is how the announcement page doesn't load correctly on a browser with half the features disabled. We are truly a special group :D.

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I have a fully functional, updated Chrome derivative with all the features enabled, and they went out of their way to dynamically load a

  Update your browser to access this website

message as the only visible content rather than test features (which they're clearly doing to GP, so how much work would it be to properly use that feature testing as the main tool for compatability checking) or just letting the browser try to load it -- displaying one of those big-tech "update your browser now" nag messages if they really feel the need to be annoying.

That message is triggered by checking for support of the CSS light-dark() function and :has() selector:

  window.CSS&&CSS.supports&&CSS.supports('color','light-dark(#000, #fff)')&&CSS.supports('selector(:has(a))')

Are you sure your browser is fully functional and updated? Chromium shipped the last part of that incantation two and a half years ago.

It’s currently at +39. I did not expect that! I expected it to settle at the bottom like something that settles at the bottom—I dunno, detritus, lees, Titanic, something like that.

Still, I’ll take the opportunity to advocate for turning off fonts. Firefox: Settings → Fonts → Advanced settings → Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above. I’ve been using the web so for 6½ years and it makes it so much better.

+40 I hate websites that do stupid stuff. My latest pet peeve is Qwen's blog, when I pinch to zoom, to be able to read their tiny graphs, there is a black bar that progressively covers the entire page.

It probably just literally doesn't work for most people. If you click through, see a broken page, and see that the top comment thinks the way in which it's broken is interesting, that'll probably be more interesting to engage with than the contents of the page.

From the code, it looks like it’s only broken if you have a browser more than about two and a half years old, JavaScript disabled, or fonts disabled. Even on HN, I would expect that to be under 5% of viewers, surely under 10%, and people that turn off JS are used to the occasional page not working (though it’s happily less common than it was five years ago).

We should not accept defeat when it comes to accessibility, graceful degradation and adherence to standards.

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