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2023-06-03 19:38:58Z (last updated 2023-10-29 13:03:19Z)
Websites were not supposed to become your applications
Years of the websites yet no real use found for Discord in your web browser
Wanted to use a web browser anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that: It's called "HTML"
"Yes please give me 800 megabytes of JavaScript. Please give me *all* of your CSS" - Statements dreamed up by the utterly ridiculous
Look at what web developers have been demanding your respect for all this time, with all the JavaScript and NodeJS we built for them
(This is *real* web development, done by *real* web developers):
If you didn't get it, that above was a parody of the "Stop doing math" meme to represent the absolute state of many websites: it's ridiculous.
The problem with most websites today is that they're designed so badly that they're just bad.
Some issues include:
Accessibility
Size
Complexity
Technical debt
Excessive resource usage
I have an opinion. It's very likely biased towards *not* doing web design at all because It could be better to rely on the web browser itself.
silk.ms is a personal website. That said, it is not exempt from (minor?) accessibility issues, non-semantic HTML and excessive usage of JavaScript (IMO).
Accessibility issues (or nits): The media page contains a completely custom media player made with quite a few bits of JavaScript. Interacting with it with VoiceOver would be pretty confusing, and impossible in some ways e.g. seeking is only possible with the mouse (Although it is possible to just "click" the first and last piece of text with VoiceOver to "seek", it's not real seeking because it only goes to specific parts (close to start and close to end respectively)).
The workaround I could think of is use the download button to load up the dedicated page for audio files in your web browser, which while isn't in style with the website, is actually more accessible.
(Regarding the browser built-in audio page though: The elements VoiceOver speaks is a bit hard to decipher. VoiceOver in LibreWolf says "0, 26, three space slash 1, 31, 2 space" for the seeker thing for an audio file currently at 0 minutes and 26 seconds, and the audio file being the length of 1 minute and 31 seconds.)
The first thing you get when you go to the homepage is a warning that is shown regardless of your web browser. It's a warning about Firefox potentially incorrectly rendering things.
I'm not sure of any cases where it happens, but having your things not working in some other browser is not great.
However, doing weird things websites were not meant to do is at best, not a great idea. Designing your website for something only like Chromium instead of for all kinds and types of web browsers can make your website unusable except in Chromium which basically encourages Chromium.
This is kind of reaching into "nit" territory. Anyways, here's how unordered lists are done:
<ul> - Computers<br> - Fun<br> - </ul>
That's not right, yet somehow VoiceOver had no problem interpreting that as a list.
In other places though like a project page, `<div>` is used instead of `<ul>` which makes VoiceOver not take it as a list.
The navigation bar is HTML, but requires JavaScript for it to exist.
Expect it to not exist when using a textual web browser, basically making the website impossible to navigate without JavaScript.
Quite easily solved by putting your links into the HTML directly.
The New York Times has a front page that is ~4 times larger (~12.36 MB uncompressed) than my *entire* website including images, redirects, and unlinked pages (~2.99 MB uncompressed, excludes some service endpoints).
(Tested on my setup with uBlock Origin disabled and cache disabled in dev tools)
It's an apples to orange comparison, but you aren't even reading an article on the homepage. You're just reading a list/excerpt of articles which are pretty much guaranteed to be smaller than the article itself.
(If you really wanted to compare my website to the New York Times, my website is 24.81 kB uncompressed to list my blog posts. The New York Times' homepage is ~498.1862152 times larger than my website listing my blog posts!)
GitHub reimplements features in native web browsers (because web development is just riddled with adding technical debt)
Some of the issues were:
GitHub reimplemented URI fragments which is subtly broken
*Insert more things here*
GitHub's implementation is subtly broken because it does not behave like my browser. It works at a basic level, but the nuanced behaviors is basically known to no one until someone notices something seriously wrong because it did not respond correctly to e.g. Reloading or re-entering the same URL. (Also, I noticed something seriously wrong)
I noticed some issues with my *own* website while writing this post:
CSS for code blocks in dark theme was giving unusable colors
Weird thing where the page was slightly larger somehow (couldn't reproduce)
I have fixed the CSS issue because I noticed it and because I can fix it.
This post is a review of websites and how broken they are.
Because my website is mainly just read and read, I've decided to launch my website as a Gemini capsule. (As of 2023-06-03T20:43:35+02:00, it's not actually available)
Gemini is a protocol that much simpler than all of the web.
Websites make themselves worse than they already are by default, and surprise, it gives worse results.
And I (will) have a Gemini capsule.
And also, the meme kinda doesn't make sense.
With the usual distractions, I was distracted in Thunderbird with a feed from The Markup. I then eventually found a post from them, and I think it may be interesting:
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