Dude, I don't know you and this is not personal. Breathe and remember there's always someone wrong on the internet. Far as I've ever been able to tell, HN is full of rudeness. It's why I don't have activity. Bigger bunch of circle jerking, back patting, myopic pedants I've rarely seen. YMMV. And I just so happen to have different accounts logged in on different devices 'cause I lost the password to my more favorite username and had to create another. shrug There's not a sneaky agenda.
I really, with all goodwill this time, recommend you spend your limited time and energy on more important matters than my misdirected flames. You spent it less than fruitfully in a tailspin over this, seemingly, and I'm sorry for that; I've been there. I should probably remember those hours when I post, but I am a deeply flawed and bitter person.
Exactly! They spent time and energy on this new codebase without gaining consensuses on the value of the new codebase and without giving their accessibility experts reasons to feel invested. And without investing in training them.
Why is user experience and accessibility always someone else's problem? Why does the burden of "learning enough" to do their job correctly always fall on everyone except the engineers who advocate doing these complete rewrites?
React and JSX are not open web standards. They're popular, but they're are not a common denominator. They require you to learn and use JavaScript first and foremost and were designed uninclusively with software engineers as the audience. This is a stark contrast to the declarative languages of CSS and HTML that were designed inclusively with designers and other non-programmers as an audience.
So, you know what? It's no surprise that a React rewrite alienated an accessibility team. It's no surprise that the accessibility team worked their asses off to try to demonstrate the value of inclusiveness and tried without success to train these engineers and get problems the engineers created fixed, only to be told the issue was going about it the wrong way.
React's fanbase largely views inclusiveness and accessibility as an optional, bolt on feature that can be addressed later. As something it's okay to sacrifice on the alter of the new hotness. React's fanbase doesn't give a crap if someone who could previously contribute something very valuable very effectively can't anymore. Someone who has concerns other than learning new languages and frameworks constantly should just get out of way, they're clearly too dumb or too old to matter.
"I'm super ignorant about accessibility, but I heard this one time. Here, accessibility experts, I googled this link for you. Should be easy to implement."
> Having a lot of information in your brain in itself has no value.
If you think of it as inert info, the accessing of which in the brain is equivalent to reading it on a web site...
But it isn't. Brains, especially in respect to deeply understood domain knowledge, change in response to how they're used.
Experts' minds create shortcuts to information in their area of expertise.
Having more information means having the ability to synthesize it, gain epiphanies that would otherwise be overlooked--and reading someone's blog post about their epiphany isn't the same as having it yourself.
I'm glad I didn't go to college, so I don't have to give any money out of guilt to a place which wastes so much of it on landscaping and sports.
That's what I saw when I visited more privileged friends at Universities, anyway.
I'd really rather give money directly to someone that needs it than to a dysfunctional organization (and they are pretty much all dysfunctional). I wish that was actually feasible.
It is indeed stupid and wasteful to deliver 40 KB of framework and 8 KB of templates and 14 KB of data and 20 KB of business logic and 15 KB of CSS to the client and then make the client do all the rest of the work to "make page happen"--especially on an open platform with so few reliable guarantees about the client's capabilities and resources.
But to say templating is only the job of the server is equally myopic. Web applications--high functionality, low content (as opposed to web sites--low functionality, high content) have struggled with the limitations of the static, stateless document paradigm for years and is the real use-case for client side templating as an answer to one of the many resulting challenges.
When a page is highly dynamic in response to interaction, it is equally stupid and wasteful to perform full page refreshes. Request, server compile, download, flow, paint. Bad. Slow, discontinuous.
Someone else mentioned UX being ignored in the quest for client side templates: no, wrong. Client side templates are at least 50% about UX. We have a DOM already there, let's use it. But that is also exactly the problem with the all-client mode: it delivers something several extra steps removed from being a useful (to the user) DOM when it could do otherwise and when doing otherwise would result in a better and more universally performant user experience.
Right now, truly smart isomorphic templates are what we need. (But, then again, by the time we get them, we probably won't need them--because the goalposts will have shifted and/or we'll have a better answer.)
Hold on there, cowboy. The innate superiority of strings over DOM based templating is not universally accepted. Because it's not unequivocally proven.
In fact, a few years ago there was an obvious tide toward experimenting with alternatives to string based templating noticeable in several some high profile efforts in the client side templating space.
Except "identity politics" aka inclusiveness are at the heart of their open governance model... Or did you miss the drama over their code of conduct; that they were going to one and how they solicited and followed advice from noted social justice advocates in drafting it.
It confuses me deeply that this fact could turn people off of the project regardless of its other practical and technical merits.
I really, with all goodwill this time, recommend you spend your limited time and energy on more important matters than my misdirected flames. You spent it less than fruitfully in a tailspin over this, seemingly, and I'm sorry for that; I've been there. I should probably remember those hours when I post, but I am a deeply flawed and bitter person.