

Gmail just became really good - henryprecheur
http://henry.precheur.org/2008/5/24/Gmail%20just%20became%20really%20good.html

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jrockway
It's amusing that people still avoid JavaScript for absolutely no reason. 1998
called, they want their unfounded fear back.

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npk
Not really -- I use plain HTML because otherwise the AJAX requests eats 50% of
my CPU and a huge part of my memory. The HTML browser is just plain faster.

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ovi256
Not trying to belittle, but it sounds like you have a slow CPU. For modern
machines, a JS interpreter (which powers AJAX) is a light, negligible charge.

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henryprecheur
JS interpreter is a negligible charge if the program running does not consume
too much resources.

Also JS makes the web less "accessible": Think about handicapped people who
can't use IE / FF / Safari.

Avoiding Javascript is one's personal choice. Ideally Javascript should not be
mandatory for surfing.

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9oliYQjP
I'm honestly asking because I don't know the answer to the following question,
though it may sound facetious. Are computing assistants for handicapped people
in such a sorry state that:

1\. for those that can't see well or at all, that they can't read off the
screen using not the underlying HTML source, but the current DOM and layout
state to determine a reasonable way to read out the screen?

2\. they offer no help for those people that have problems with precise mouse
movement?

Quite frankly, the whole accessibility argument appears to be a red herring
unless the state of accessibility technology is such that it is crap and is
not progressive. Even properly coded Flash (much like "proper" XHTML with CSS
layouts) is accessible to screen readers these days and has been for the past
couple of versions.

We didn't stop building multi-level buildings to accommodate people in
wheelchairs, we just added ramps and elevators. I'm not willing to stop using
javascript because of crap accessibility assistants. However, I am perfectly
ready and willing to to build the equivalent ramp and elevator into my
javascript functionality. There is nothing fundamentally inaccessible about
using javascript. If it were such a big problem, Cocoa applications or .NET
applications would be inaccessible too. But they aren't
([http://developer.apple.com/ue/accessibility/universalaccess....](http://developer.apple.com/ue/accessibility/universalaccess.html))
and in fact often have specifically added the necessary ramps/elevators so
that they are accessible.

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henryprecheur
At my school there was a blind guy, he used Lynx to surf.

Once I looked how he was surfing / coding. And he was incredibly slow ...
"Normal" people scan the page. He could not, he had to more or less "read" the
whole page. I did not see much more, but it gave me the impression that
surfing was a frustrating experience for him.

One of his friend told me that one thing that screwed him each time a was
surfing was the "Javascript links". On lots of pages (well ... too much)
instead of a regular HTML link there was a piece of Javascript code witch
supposedly was opening a new window or do "something smart". These links did
not work for him. The worse part of the story is that the fall-back mechanism
is pretty easy to do:

<a href='page.html' onclick='return do_something_smart(this.href);'>

Maybe the situation has improved. But I guess that it did not improve that
much. Writing a Web-browser is complex, therefor I believe that integrating
accessibility features is difficult too. And upgrading everybody's wheelchair
is not easy in practice. So it is for screen-reader, and accessibility
software. We still have IE 6 around! It is utopic to believe that every
handicapped would upgrade in just a few years.

Of course we should not drop Javascript, but we should think about its impact.
It is like adding a step in front of a building; it can be a real obstacle to
some people.

The web would be a better place if we do so. Not only for our handicapped
friends, but for us in the future. I don't want to give up surfing when I am
old because I broke the web with fancy and non-essential features.

HTML is the web. Javascript enhance it. But Javascript is not the web.

Here is a good place to start: <http://diveintoaccessibility.org/> (Does not
really speaks about javascript but it gives a lots of useful advises)

~~~
9oliYQjP
When I'm making informational web sites, I typically work very hard to achieve
a seamless degradation. I wrote my comment after working on a web app I'm
developing. I sat there and tried to figure out how I could possibly make this
thing accessible to a blind person and I don't think I can without creating an
entirely different user interface just for them. The problem with my interface
is I'm not just showing an information article that can read left-to-right
top-to-bottom. It's more of a car dashboard.

As more and more applications hit the web, I don't think we'll be able to just
say that HTML is the web. For better or for worse (there's a whole other
argument for another day) we've entered a situation with web applications
where there are several players: HTML+CSS+Javascript, Flash, Silverlight, etc.
Unless somebody sits down and says "Ok everybody we really need to get a grip
on creating an accessibility convention for HTML+CSS+Javascript applications"
you're going to have the proprietary folks pushing accessibility as an
advantage of their platform. And you know what? They'll be right.

Thanks for the link, I never heard of that website so I'll check it out. For
what it's worth, I worked at a company that had some blind people test our
sites when they were done nested tables and paid no attention to
accessibility, and versions which (at least from a technical standpoint)
implemented all the best practices. Frustratingly, they didn't seem to do much
better. The content itself needed to be tailored to them because there was
simply too much. Like you say, the web of today seems to be built for scanning
large quantities of information. Just like you can't take an info-heavy
website and throw it at a mobile device because people have different
requirements and constraints when browsing from a mobile device, making a
website accessible doesn't seem to be just an engineer problem but an
editorial one too.

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silencio
Actually, Adobe and Microsoft aren't doing so shabbily on that front.

<http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/index.html> <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/bb980136.aspx>

The problem is that people don't seem to take that kind of testing into
consideration unless it really matters (e.g. section 508 for .gov websites).

Lastly, nested tables I don't think are THAT much of a problem. CSS can be
useful in other ways - e.g. to display almost the same information in a
completely different way that may benefit low vision people, or mobile users.
It's some uses of ajax and the like that can be a problem, not so much a table
based layout or something like that.

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ryanmahoski
On a mobile unit, sure. But JavaScript powers keyboard shortcuts, my favorite
Gmail feature. If that costs me CPU cycles or bandwidth latency, I don't
notice it. I appreciate simplicity but on a modern computer/browser,
efficiency and features often trump convention and portability.

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tdavis
All this discussion makes me think that if someone were to create, say, a
Firefox plug-in for accessibility -- one that could react to Javascript-
related DOM changes and such -- there would be a serious market for it.

Of course, if web developers would stop being lazy and properly implement
things like progressive enhancement and graceful degradation, it wouldn't be
needed. Every site I make starts as non-Javascript, even if I plan for the
entire thing to be laden with it in the end.

Then again, all of this is moot anyway, because the author gave absolutely no
reasons for why he prefers the HTML version and doesn't use the JS version. I
am going to run with the idea that he fears _JAVASCRIPT GNOMES!!!_

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maxklein
I would NEVER cater for an audience that willingly switched off javascript.
This is like people who refuse to buy any cars that have electronics in them.
Javascript is no longer some esoteric or slow - it's supported by 90% of all
browsers, and pretty much critical for most of the web.

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Prrometheus
But how can you remember anyone's email address without the javascript auto-
complete feature turned on?

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ivankirigin
EXACTLY. The benefit of turning off javascript is small, and the cost is huge.

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xenoterracide
I think the UI version one is the best (not generic html). the new ui they've
done is slow and bloated, and seems to have little improvements.

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hollerith
I agree with the article. I like Gmail a lot better now that I no longer have
to manually switch it back to "basic HTML" mode.

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nazgulnarsil
thank christ. now I can actually use my gmail account instead of just
forwarding it to other accounts.

