https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/ Terence Eden's Blog The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML 2021-01-26 by @edent | #html5 #web #weeknotes #work | 21 comments | Read ~5,245 times. --------------------------------------------------------------------- I've told this story at conferences - but due to the general situation I thought I'd retell it here. A few years ago I was doing policy research in a housing benefits office in London. They are singularly unlovely places. The walls are brightened up with posters offering helpful services for people fleeing domestic violence. The security guards on the door are cautiously indifferent to anyone walking in. The air is filled with tense conversations between partners - drowned out by the noise of screaming kids. In the middle, a young woman sits on a hard plastic chair. She is surrounded by canvas-bags containing her worldly possessions. She doesn't look like she is in a great emotional place right now. Clutched in her hands is a games console - a PlayStation Portable. She stares at it intensely; blocking out the world with Candy Crush. Or, at least, that's what I thought. Walking behind her, I glance at her console and recognise the screen she's on. She's connected to the complementary WiFi and is browsing the GOV.UK pages on Housing Benefit. She's not slicing fruit; she's arming herself with knowledge. The PSP's web browser is - charitably - pathetic. It is slow, frequently runs out of memory, and can only open 3 tabs at a time. But the GOV.UK pages are written in simple HTML. They are designed to be lightweight and will work even on rubbish browsers. They have to. This is for everyone. Not everyone has a big monitor, or a multi-core CPU burning through the teraflops, or a broadband connection. The photographer Chase Jarvis coined the phrase "the best camera is the one that's with you". He meant that having a crappy instamatic with you at an important moment is better than having the best camera in the world locked up in your car. The same is true of web browsers. If you have a smart TV, it probably has a crappy browser. Twitter's guest mode displayed on a TV. My old car had a built-in crappy web browser. The dashboard of a BMW i3 - there is a web browser on the central display. Both are painful to use - but they work! If your laptop and phone both got stolen - how easily could you conduct online life through the worst browser you have? If you have to file an insurance claim online - will you get sent a simple HTML form to fill in, or a DOCX which won't render? What vital information or services are forbidden to you due to being trapped in PDFs or horrendously complicated web sites? Are you developing public services? Or a system that people might access when they're in desperate need of help? Plain HTML works. A small bit of simple CSS will make look decent. JavaScript is probably unnecessary - but can be used to progressively enhance stuff. Add alt text to images so people paying per MB can understand what the images are for (and, you know, accessibility). Go sit in an uncomfortable chair, in an uncomfortable location, and stare at an uncomfortably small screen with an uncomfortably outdated web browser. How easy is it to use the websites you've created? I chatted briefly to the young woman afterwards. She'd been kicked out by her parents and her friends had given her the bus fare to the housing benefits office. She had nothing but praise for how helpful the staff had been. I asked about the PSP - a hand-me-down from an older brother - and the web browser. Her reply was "It's shit. But it worked." I think that's all we can strive for. --------------------------------------------------------------------- More posts from around the site: 21 thoughts on "The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML" 1. [f64d8851] Sandra says: 2021-01-26 at 16:06 @Edent Oh, wow, this story reminds me that we still need to figure out how to solve that TLS issue for old devices. Reply 2. [w-3tywsp] Matt Hobbs says: 2021-01-26 at 18:19 "GOV.UK pages are written in simple HTML. They are designed to be lightweight and will work even on rubbish browsers. They have to. This is for everyone." Reply 3. [09dfc05a] bookandswordblog@scholar.social says: 2021-01-26 at 19:19 @Edent its the same outside the big cities in low-population-density countries like Canada or Australia: slow expensive Internet Reply 4. [J-2ObQf9] JulieG says: 2021-01-27 at 00:34 This is why the web will always be my first priority, even though developing apps is fun. Reply 5. [k9Zp8HkW] reddit programming says: 2021-01-27 at 03:16 The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML shkspr.mobi/blog/ 2021/01/t... /post reddit.com/r/programming/... Reply 6. [9ebf26f5] Daniel Boone says: 2021-01-27 at 07:18 I think the shittiest browser I own is on a paperwhite Kindle. It's pretty shitty. But I may well have worse, hidden in devices where I've never had reason to look. Reply 1. [fc9a62b7] wizzwizz4 says: 2021-01-27 at 19:50 The Swindle Paperwhite's browser is actually not that bad. It can do Cloudflare and hCaptcha... most of the time. (Sometimes it hangs.) I'd say it has approximate feature parity with IE11 (except for not being IE, of course). Reply 7. [57b2fe5a] Aearil says: 2021-01-27 at 09:26 @Edent This one hit close to home: I spent my teenage years slowly scouring the web using my PSP, and yeah, you can forget about anything javascript heavy...Also, nowadays the PSP is near unusable: it's got ancient TLS that isn't supported anywhere anymore Reply 8. [26944bbf] Kevin Thorpe says: 2021-01-27 at 10:46 I have poor eyesight, and it only gets worse with age. I also have some old monitors on my desk. I keep hassling the guys at work because I simply can't use some of the stuff they're building. No good it being pretty if it's unusable. And things like angular single page apps are awful. Things simply don't render or don't work when you click sometimes and you have zero idea why. If I can't use it on links (text mode browser) then as far as I'm concerned it's broken. I know this is extreme but that's what the web was for. Reply 9. [favicon] Danny Yee says: 2021-01-27 at 12:46 Web 0.5 wanderingdanny.com/oxford/2011/02... Reply 10. [c7OmYus3] uu>>>> says: 2021-01-27 at 14:37 Really interesting article Reply 11. [tYpa2MoZ] Simon Everest says: 2021-01-27 at 14:56 This is so important. Keeping things simple isn't about dogma or making it hard or boring for devs, or unwhizzy to frustrate senior folks, it's to make sure stuff works for most people in even the toughest circumstances. Reply 12. [fgzUGxQ-] Marcus Elliott says: 2021-01-27 at 14:59 This. Always this. Reply 13. [zurg4E3M] future Dr. Cori Faklaris says: 2021-01-27 at 15:26 What a fantastic usability test! "Go sit in an uncomfortable chair, in an uncomfortable location, and stare at an uncomfortably small screen with an uncomfortably outdated web browser. How easy is it to use the websites you've created?" Reply 14. [c3zysscQ] Richard Morton says: 2021-01-27 at 16:14 GOV.UK is so well designed and simple, relying mostly on HTML and CSS (in the best sense of the word) that it even works on my ancient Kindle 5 (no keyboard, no touchscreen, no bluetooth or backlight) Reply 15. [55ee19d0] fluffy says: 2021-01-27 at 17:08 Whenever I build a new website I skate make sure it's at least basically navigable in lynx and w3m. I should dig out my old PSP as well. The TLS issue many people have noted is why I also don't force my sites to https except for logging in and anything where privacy matters. Not everything needs to be secure, especially things that need to be accessible. Reply 16. [f48158ca] mattl says: 2021-01-27 at 17:58 I wonder how to handle old browsers with no-longer-supported SSL and TLS support. Reply 17. [46437999] ofcourse says: 2021-01-27 at 18:00 Text-only* websites https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html 1MB Club https://1mb.club/ Reply 18. [c2904315] Jeremy Friesen says: 2021-01-27 at 19:24 @cadadr @Edent agreed. Current web trends favor those and only those who chase web trends that are themselves solving self-inflicted developer problems and the pressures of surveillance capitalism on computation Reply 19. [afc07126] superkuh says: 2021-01-27 at 19:46 I noticed in the photo of the (2015) car browser you show HTML mobile.twitter.com. Unfortunately twitter disabled this completely in 2021. The only way to get HTML twitter content is to use a third party application which calls the twitter API and then generates the HTML itself (like nitter.com). Reply 20. [698214bf] McNutt says: 2021-01-27 at 20:12 I think there's likely an entire generation of web developers who should read this. shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/t... Reply Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] Comment[ ] Name * [ ] Email * [ ] Website [ ] [ ] Notify me of follow-up comments by email. [ ] Notify me of new posts by email. [Post Comment] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Learn More) [ ] [Ping me!] Subscribe to Blog via Email Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Join 11,860 other subscribers. 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