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

You’re missing the point. By using progressive enhancement, you can have all the latest CSS techniques and have a website that works without CSS. As the customer, the UK government is entitled to demand you do that when building their websites. If you’re not prepared to, you don’t get their business.

The gov.uk website contains millions of pages, many of which are quite old, so you will always be able to find bad examples. But the new stuff (built using the GDS Service Standard I linked to) is really good. I doubt if any organisation does more user research and user testing. It’s almost impossible to recruit good accessibility testers in the UK because the government has recruited hundreds of them and even more UX researchers.

As for “being accepted by the community”, it’s not for developers to accept anything other than their responsibility to best serve the end users and other stakeholders. And end users neither know nor care about the latest CSS techniques.

Steve

From: Michael Livesey <mike.j.livesey@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, March 16, 2024 7:09 PM
To: Steve Green <steve.green@testpartners.co.uk>
Cc: David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk>; 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?

We will have to agree to disagree, Steve.

Anyone who has done a UK tax return or tried to set up a childcare tax account knows that .gov sites are notoriously bad UX.

Regardless, as I said above, F87 is illogical because there will be more issues than just ::before or ::after content problems for most websites. Why focus on those two pseudo elements?

The vast majority of websites are a complete mess without CSS and fail dozens of criteria. If the intent is to make websites accessible without CSS, it would have the effect that most modern CSS techniques would not be able to be used and that is something that would not be accepted by the community.





On Saturday, March 16, 2024, Steve Green <steve.green@testpartners.co.uk<mailto:steve.green@testpartners.co.uk>> wrote:
> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> Steve
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> From: Michael Livesey <mike.j.livesey@gmail.com<mailto:mike.j.livesey@gmail.com>>
> Sent: Saturday, March 16, 2024 7:21 AM
> To: David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk<mailto:forums@david-woolley.me.uk>>
> Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org<mailto: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?
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> 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?
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> Perhaps it is time F87 was removed?
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> 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:
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>>> temporary network errors [hmm, network errors impact HTML same as CSS]
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>> I still encounter these, and they are more disconcerting than a complete failure to load, as would be the case for HTML.
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