Comment by bryanrasmussen
16 days ago
>I see a lot of these "bare HTML pages" and they are lacking important stuff like i18n/a11y/WCAG compliance. Try adding all that back in and you'll see your website bloat right up.
having lots of JavaScript tends to make more WCAG problems, because you do interactive stuff that needs to be described. Having bare HTML and the accessibility that is required for that is not tending to bloat in my experience.
Users need interactive stuff. If your site isn't interactive and your competitor's site IS interactive, customers almost certainly will prefer your competitor.
When you try to chain that stuff across multiple backend-rendered pages, you get a whole other list of problems. If you need to track all the otherwise transient UI stuff on the BE, you have now created a whole mess of stateful APIs and turned horizontal scaling into a much bigger issue than it needed to be.
Users wants something that will help with whatever they want done. And the quicker, the better. Interactivity is nice, but I never seen anyone complains about multipages applications.
> If you need to track all the otherwise transient UI stuff on the BE
So don’t add transient stuff? You send a page or a form according to the URL, the user does whatever it wants and either request a new page or submit the form. Each page is standalone like activities in an Android app. Anything transient is taken care of on the client side.
>Users need interactive stuff.
so you argued that the need for internationalization and Accessibility was such that if you tried to add that in to bare html - css solution that you would end up getting bloated, I argued (based on my experience) that accessibility bloat actually comes from the need to support various JavaScript bits of accessibility.
To which you then argue that the JavaScript parts are needed.
If so it is the JavaSript that adds the bloat, because the accessibility bloats to support the JavaSript.
I mean I'm not against JavaSript but I have seen many sites that didn't need it; and I've been forced by work requirements to add in too much of it on sites that needed very little or even none at all.