RE: Is Common Failure Technique F87: inserting non-decorative content by using ::before and ::after pseudo-elements; still valid?

Actually, the opposite is true. In user testing, UK government websites perform better than most other websites. People literally ask why all websites can’t be like that. Of course some of the old parts of the website aren’t as good, but the usability and accessibility of the newer parts are mostly excellent. The design is rather boring, but it’s mostly designers who obsess over that – users really don’t care.

And disabling CSS doesn’t need to cause problems with focus, resize, reflow etc. In fact, those things work perfectly without CSS. If websites don’t work without CSS, it’s because most developers don’t learn how to do progressive enhancement these days. But 20 years ago progressive enhancement was a common practice and websites often worked fine without CSS and JavaScript. They had to in order to meet WCAG 1.0. And it would still be perfectly possible to do that with most websites today.

You can still use modern selectors such as :not or :has or :focus-within. You just need to design the website to work without them, then add them to give the appearance and behaviour you want. The appearance and behaviour without them might not be as slick, but there’s no reason why the website couldn’t still be usable.

Steve

From: Michael Livesey <mike.j.livesey@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, March 16, 2024 7:21 AM
To: David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk>
Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: Is Common Failure Technique F87: inserting non-decorative content by using ::before and ::after pseudo-elements; still valid?

I think Phil has a valid point. If one disconnected all CSS, most modern web pages would have more accessibility failures than just :before and :after elements, so why single out those two pseudo-elements?

Modern web pages are infinitely more complex than was envisaged in 1999 or 2015. Disabling CSS would cause focus, resize, reflow, use of colour and goodness knows how many other failures. It would make using modern selectors such as :not or :has or :focus-within impossible to use.

Kudos for the UK government insisting on web pages work without CSS, although anyone who has visited a .gov website will agree, they are terrible UX and difficult for non-accessible users to navigate let alone accessible users. They should be held more as an example of why well designed CSS should be required.

Perhaps it is time F87 was removed?



On Friday, March 15, 2024, David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk<mailto:forums@david-woolley.me.uk>> wrote:
> On 15/03/2024 22:10, Phill Jenkins wrote:
>>
>> temporary network errors [hmm, network errors impact HTML same as CSS]
>
> I still encounter these, and they are more disconcerting than a complete failure to load, as would be the case for HTML.
>
>