← Back to context

Comment by realityfactchex

4 hours ago

Discourse has one major technical challenge currently, that I know about. It doesn't work (for being logged in and interacting) on iOS 15 and older as of the past year. It's view-only for those devices.

Because of a load-bearing CSS attribute, as I understand it.

So, it's hard to consider it a web-standards supportive platform anymore.

Or, at least, it's a web platform with a technical challenge of not being interactive (so users can post and interact) from web standards supporting devices but lacking whatever HTML standards were introduced since as recently as 2021.

I'd call it a technical challenge. Literally the CSS language framework / build process is just not that flexible.

Semantic design development process became separated from semantic HTML serving somewhere along the way.

Maybe that's fine and quite good for 99% of uses. But I see this one as a glaring technical question mark.

Bringing it back to the titular point in the OP, the "crappy forums" do not seem to (cause some users to) suffer from this problem.

[0] https://meta.discourse.org/t/dropping-ios-15-other-old-brows...

> Discourse has one major technical challenge currently, that I know about. It doesn't work (for being logged in and interacting) on iOS 15 and older as of the past year. It's view-only for those devices.

The phones that can't upgrade past iOS 15 are over ten years old. What is the current iOS 15 user base? It's probably more cost-effective for Discourse to gift affected users a compatible device than to keep old code in place.