The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
HTML5 web WeekNotes work · 56 comments · 700 words · read ~66,919 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.
My old car had a built-in crappy web browser.
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.
Here are some stats on games consoles visiting GOV.UK
@Edent Oh, wow, this story reminds me that we still need to figure out how to solve that TLS issue for old devices.💔
I think the solution is to reinstate HTTP as a first-class Web technology for informational sites.
Andie says:
You can use Opera Mini, which is still supported even on J2ME devices.
Dan says:
Ugh I know one of my clients is using Nokia Series 60 phones to collect data and all certs are passed their validation date for the latest version of J2ME that is running on the phone.
"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." 💯👏➕
@Edent its the same outside the big cities in low-population-density countries like Canada or Australia: slow expensive Internet
This is why the web will always be my first priority, even though developing apps is fun.
The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/t… /post reddit.com/r/programming/…
Daniel Boone says:
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.
wizzwizz4 says:
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).
@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
Kevin Thorpe says:
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.
Web 0.5 wanderingdanny.com/oxford/2011/02…
Really interesting article
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.
This. Always this.
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?"
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)
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.
I wonder how to handle old browsers with no-longer-supported SSL and TLS support.
ofcourse says:
Text-only* websites https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html
1MB Club https://1mb.club/
@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
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).
I think there's likely an entire generation of web developers who should read this.
shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/t…
Brian M says:
100% yes - Some developers really need banning from the profession - Saw a fairly large website who's developers/marketing department thought it was a great idea to have white text on a light grey background, guess they thought it looked cool. Of course such horrors can be done just as easily with good old HTML or the shiniest and newest framework/CSS!
The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML lobste.rs/s/glaa8z #web shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/t…
The unreasonable effectiveness of "unreasonable effectiveness" essays 😀
Though I quite agree with this one, and would say it's not just for public services - it's for anything that is more "document" than "application", which is actually a lot of the web.
I even heard someone say that HTML isn't a proper language a while back. We need more vocal advocates for why it was, and still is an important language. In other news, this search engine rocks for looking back at old HTML websites - https://wiby.me/
shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/t…. Amen. Bring back simple web. I shouldn’t have to load 10GB of garbage and multiple copies of JS libraries to read an article.
Ted says:
My worst web browser is an old tablet running iOS 9. It's new enough that everybody tries to serve up modern pages, but old enough that they don't work.
This here is why sites like nairaland will remain very active for the foreseeable future in countries like Nigeria where internet data is neither cheap nor bandwidth surplus. shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/t…
This is gatekeeping and "old man yells at the cloud" content I totally support. 👌
shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/t…
danluu.com/web-bloat/
Love to see the way GOV.UK pages are built praised here. They'll probably render on your toaster since they're not full of JavaScript that only works in the latest version of a big advertising company's browser. shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/t…
This is an important anecdote: shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/t…
It's never about building the flashiest thing, it's about making sure that your thing is usable. Accessible to everyone. If you're making user-facing services, you should basically be testing them on, like, a Wii.
Nearly every time I’m forced to load gigabytes of JavaScript I don’t want to have running on my device, I’m reminded of the unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML. And I think about switching back to lynx for all my browsing needs. shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/t…
Plaidoyer pour que les sites utiles soient développés en HTML basique, pour être accessibles par un maximum de gens. Lorsqu’on est en difficulté et a absolument besoin d’informations, on n’a pas forcément d’un navigateur capable d’exécuter des tonnes de JS shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/t…
@Edent Project Gemini is a cool effort to move away from the ridiculous heavy modern Web, like a modern take on gopher https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ Project Gemini
Before 2016, I had no smartphone, so my only way to browse the web and share stuff on Twitter on the go was to use the Nintendo 3DS browser on Wi-Fi hotspots.
Particularly sobering in these times when we've been obliged to attempt to support so much pupil leaning online shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/t…
via @dajbelshaw via @johnjohnston
shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/t…
여기에 대해 사람들이 단계적 기능 축소graceful degradation라느니 자바스크립트 없는 웹 개발이라느니 그런 기술적인 논의가 많지만, 나는 GOV.UK라는 서비스를 가능케 한 정부 디지털 서비스(GDS, gds.blog.gov.uk)가 훨씬 중요하다 생각한다.
Front-End Dissatisfaction (and Backing Off) | CSS-Tricks said on :
This Article was mentioned on css-tricks.com
간단한 HTML의 예상치 못한 효과 | GeekNews said on :
This Article was mentioned on news.hada.io
Sergei Gribovskii says:
That is all true if only I care about people with the old tech. But if they are not even close to my potential clients I won't bother making my service ugly just because some guy with a 15 years old phone can not use it. If they can't use it but what they will have to update to a new device/OS.
So? Who said you needed to make your service ugly to make it accessible? Esthetic pleasure and usability are not inherently at odds. I personally choose to have an ugly website but it is because of my own esthetic preferences. You should find trying to get to data on it an unremarkable and inoffensive experience, on everything from lynx on a Pentium Pro with 192MB of whatever RAM they used to use back then and a slow ATA disk to Chrome on your 64-core Threadripper box with 128GB of fast DDR4 and 3-way NVM Express SSD RAID.
이걸 잘 따른 예시가 영국 정부 사이트. 간단한 HTML만으로 쓰여있어서 거의 모든 브라우저에서 작동한다. 심지어는 스마트 TV나 자동차 네비게이션의 웹 브라우저에서도 잘 확인할 수 있다고. gov.uk shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/t…
5 things you don't need Javascript for said on :
This Article was mentioned on lexoral.com
This is why I've come to believe that if a website doesn't work in lynx (a browser for command-line interfaces), it just doesn't work.
Thank you for writing this it brought me to tears it’s very good to remember these things
@blog This is a fantastic real life example of the problems created by modern bloated websites that can so easily be avoided when emphasizing core functionality. Responsive web design can also account for old browsers when the default layout is built assuming minimum functions found in older browsers.
https://www.sitepoint.com/support-old-browsers-responsive-web-design/
https://www.w3schools.com/Css/css_rwd_intro.asp
@blog
I feel this!
The only time I have been homeless was before the www existed and before I had a mobile phone!
I lost my job and bedsit in the same week.
That weekend, I literally wandered the streets, hoping to bump into someone I could ask for help.
I'd knocked on a couple of doors, (including my parents) and been refused.
The benefits office wasn't open until Monday.
It was cold and miserable.
Eventually, a friend helped me!
We are still friends now 35+ years later!
@blog I remember reading something (maybe it was about the NHS's design guidelines?) that said something like, "Imagine your user on their worst day using a 5-year old phone on a spotty cellular network accessing your website".
That's the person we should be designing and building for.