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

And my experience of US Govt websites vs UK would say that I can understand why the results show that. The US ones, ESTA for instance, are obscured by overblown language and poor UX.

From: Steve Green <steve.green@testpartners.co.uk>
Sent: Monday, March 18, 2024 8:44 PM
To: Michael Livesey <mike.j.livesey@gmail.com>; Adam Cooper <cooperad@bigpond.com>
Cc: Marc Haunschild <marc.haunschild@accessibility.consulting>; 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?

Leaving aside the fact that the survey is 5 years old, it's about US government websites, not UK government websites.

And I know it's true that some UK government websites score well because we do some of the testing.

But you've moved the discussion away from accessibility, towards usability, which is much less dependent on code quality. I well know that online retailers spend a fortune on conversion rate optimisation. Sadly, very few put the same effort into providing an accessible user experience, which is where code quality matters.

Steve

From: Michael Livesey <mike.j.livesey@gmail.com<mailto:mike.j.livesey@gmail.com>>
Sent: Monday, March 18, 2024 7:31 AM
To: Adam Cooper <cooperad@bigpond.com<mailto:cooperad@bigpond.com>>
Cc: Marc Haunschild <marc.haunschild@accessibility.consulting<mailto:marc.haunschild@accessibility.consulting>>; 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?

It was claimed above that gov website get high marks in usability surveys, but this is not true. (likely the same result for UK gov as US gov websites.)

https://www.nextgov.com/digital-government/2019/08/survey-public-wants-government-websites-be-easier-use/159387/

Feedback surveys routinely find that people want gov websites to be more mobile friendly and more like commercial sites.

Amazon spends billions making their website as easy to use as possible. The reason commercial sites score better is because easier to use = easier to buy = more profit. The customer value chain demands it.

As Adam pointed out, everyone (businesses and users) want websites that are genuinely usable across all devices, they don't care what is under the hood.

This discussion does seem to be like the ones around code validation.

On Sunday, March 17, 2024, Adam Cooper <cooperad@bigpond.com<mailto:cooperad@bigpond.com>> wrote:
> And they get paid to develop as quickly as possible because development is costly hence the expediency of frameworks etc.
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> Take your outrage up with the people holding the purse strings.
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> I'd respectfully recommend that you have a closer look at frameworks such as angular which provide developers every opportunity to implement appropriate structural, elemental, and text-level semantics when developing UI components.
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> No progressive enhancement required.
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> In my view, 'semantics' in the sense used in discussions about HTML is ill-defined and ambiguous, and - as a linguistic or philosophical concept -poorly understood by the accessibility and developer communities.
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> And much of it - as Michael rightly points out - is stuck in concepts of documents and not user-interfaces.
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> Frankly, I couldn't care less about what is 'under the hood' as long as the UI is genuinely usable.
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> It's like the thankfully dead discussions about code validation and accessibility ... a rabbit hole down which no-one should have gone.
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> From: Michael Livesey <mike.j.livesey@gmail.com<mailto:mike.j.livesey@gmail.com>>
> Sent: Monday, March 18, 2024 6:50 AM
> To: Marc Haunschild <marc.haunschild@accessibility.consulting<mailto:marc.haunschild@accessibility.consulting>>
> 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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> It's got nothing to do with developers "not wanting" to develop. Developers don't choose to develop, they get paid to develop to provide digital transformation for businesses.
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> Progressive enhancement has no use case because "no-CSS" and "no-JS" web development is a nonsense in modern development.
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> Something that has no use case and offers no competitive advantage is not something we can justify funding to develop. I can't make a business case for something that is nonsense, only the UK government can fund nonsense projects.
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> On Sunday, March 17, 2024, Marc Haunschild <marc.haunschild@accessibility.consulting<mailto:marc.haunschild@accessibility.consulting>> wrote:
>> Hello everybody,
>> Steve is right (like nearly always).
>> He knows, what he says, he obviously was working on websites with progressive enhancement in mind and what I know from other discussions he also knows how to write DRY reusable code.
>> We old developers have been in the same place, where younger developers are know: how can I achieve a layout or make something work with little effort of learning. Because learning is such a waste of time, right? - After sitting down and reading stuff you still stand empty handed. There is nothing to show.
>> How much cooler is it to stack some frameworks on each other and with some abracdabra I have something cool - which is maybe not even what I wanted, but looks even much cooler.
>> And don't get me wrong. I don't want to sound judgy. I completely understand the temptation of doing cool things with ease.
>> But honestly: if I look at "modern" websites I would like to puke. I'm so happy, that I recently stopped developing, because I would go crazy if I would have to work with that bullshit.
>> Before yesterday I was invited to a live coding session from a tail wind lover (and as much as I heard this is one of the better frameworks). Man - this was hard for me!
>> I mean: instead of order:1 in a central css file this guy wrote class="order-last". Why someone would praise the possibility to actually write more than less code?
>> And how is this scalable. When I write ion my CSS
>> .copy {
>>   order: 1
>> }
>> It will affect each and every appearance of my copyright container. I might reuse it in a sidebar, in the footer of an article or an entire page - on each page.
>> When there was no CSS back in the nineties, I wanted to cry, after I added bgcolor="fancyshmancy" to dozens of text chunks and the designer told me, that she changed her mind and the collier must be a little brighter - and after see saw this told me, that's still no good and I've got to remove all background color - and when she saw it again decide, that for some headings in boxes we should keep it. And during every step I might've forgotten to delete or change some instances.
>> And than CSS was given to us by the God of Internet.
>> h1 {
>>   background: fancyshmancy
>> }
>> Hell yeah!
>> You want paragraphs to look the same?
>> One second later I've added a " ,p"
>> Here you go!
>> Only the first paragraph after the h1? I added an "h1 +" et voilá.
>> It was even fun when the designer came up with new ideas.
>> This still works, still does scale and it still is that easy!
>> An it's cheap! It uses less storage capacity (on the SSD and RAM - on the server and the client!), less bandwidth, less everything.
>> And it's fast! If you use javascript for fancy presentations like animation, than this is maybe the slowest most sessource consuming way to animate something of all. CSS animations are calculated by the browser - and they're not written in JavaScript. For a reason.
>> If you like to melt the glaciers, you definitely you should use JavaScript even for server side programming!
>> People always answer me: but bootstrap comes with a documentation and everybody knows it! Wrong!
>> Nobody knows it. Everybody learns it! Instead of CSS. Which also comes with a documentation by the way...
>> And when your fancyshmancy website is ready and responsive and has a great UX and passes all WCAG SCs most people of this world still can't use it.
>> Because to read 398 bytes of text you make them download 4,454 MByte - a lot of them JavaScript, that makes your website unusable slow.
>> I often get then: that's not true. I've 100 points in all lighthouse tests and all my friends and colleagues think, my site is supercool and super easy to use and also so really fancyshmancy. They all can use it!
>> And I'm like: "How many of them own the best selling smartphone of the world? A SAMSUNG for 150,- EUR when new or a 20 EUR smartphone from Alibaba?
>> You know that the average citizen in the US has a higher income than 95% of the world's population, including the US citizens that has an income below average?
>> If your colleagues and friends and family loved your products, than this is maybe only because they're part of a very privileged minority!
>> In short: Steve is right: we still can build websites with progressive enhancement in mind. Websites that still work when people want to use it, that simple cannot effort the fees they have to pay to download all of the images.
>> Think inclusive. Deliver lean, fast pages. Speed is a feature! Accessibility is not enough!
>> One more thing: I know, most people are not able to work like this, because there companies throw dozens of frameworks on them. All these have to be learned and to be learned again with each new version.
>> Actually this is the opposite of getting fast and cheap results of high quality with the least effort. It's much more like stacking things onto each other is making the people forget their users. Instead of doing conceptual wirk they're playing Jenga with libraries. Developers have so much work, that they have no time for making concepts, learning the real stuff and make things reusable (which means cheap while scaling).
>> If someone wants to scale nowadays he just buys more memory, more CPU time, more bandwidth. That's no good from an economical and ecological point of view.
>> For further information I recommend to listen to Bruce Lawson (for example last years talk "Who's web is it anyway?") or Mike Monteiro  (for example "how to build an atomic bomb" - which is about scaling the bad impact of your design decisions).
>> Inclusive ethic design is needed badly! And it begins with humble graceful degradation. Even if we need JavaScript for some things, then write 12 lines of hand coded JavaScript. And keep this as a snippet or put it in a library for the whole team with three lines of documentation in your git, so others can reuse and improve it. And if you really need one or two frameworks, than tailor them at least. And use <button class="button"> instead of <div class="button role="button" tabindex...>
>> Sorry, I don't mean to be rude. I know the world just became like this, but we did this. Designer, programmers, product owners. We make the (digital) world! "We were supposed to build a better world. Design and technology was supposed to point the way towards utopia. Instead, we designed a nightmare" (Mike Monteiro)
>> I don't blame others. That includes me of course. But at least we can (and must) try to be the change we want to see!
>>
>> Whose web is it anyway
>> https://brucelawson.co.uk/2023/whose-web-is-it-anyway-my-axe-con-talk/
>> How to build an atomic bomb
>> https://beyondtellerrand.com/events/dusseldorf-2018/speakers/mike-monteiro
>> --
>> Mit freundlichen Grüßen
>>
>> Marc Haunschild - he / him - #gernPerDu
>> Prüfstelle im BIK-BITV-Prüfverbund
>>
>> Marc Haunschild Accessibility Consulting
>> Sonnenhof 32
>> 53119 Bonn
>>
>> Telefon: 0170 8 64 00 63
>> Web: https://Accessibility.Consulting<https://accessibility.consulting/> https://mhis.de<https://mhis.de/>
>> Email: Marc.Haunschild@Accessibility.Consulting<mailto:Marc.Haunschild@Accessibility.Consulting>
>>
>> Am 17.03.2024 um 10:00 schrieb Michael Livesey <mike.j.livesey@gmail.com<mailto:mike.j.livesey@gmail.com>>:
>> I was just about to post the same. The idea of progressive enhancement in the era of evergreen browsers harks to a bygone era. Progressive enhancement is dead.
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>> Furthermore, it's actually detrimental to accessibility rather than supportive of it because it forces an architecture that is terrible UX for everyone.
>>
>
Kevin Prince  
Product Accessibility & Usability Consultant
 
  
Foster Moore 
A Teranet Company 
  
 
E kevin.prince@fostermoore.com 
Christchurch 
fostermoore.com 
> On Saturday, March 16, 2024, Adam Cooper <cooperad@bigpond.com<mailto:cooperad@bigpond.com>> wrote:
>>> Great for hand-coded cottage industry web sites, but, in the real world, most off-the-shelf front ends are about speed of assembly ... foggy windows into data for which progressive enhancement/graceful degradation is a quaintness from yesteryear ... let's not forget that progressive enhancement gave us those horrid to use menus comprising endless nested lists of links ... in my opinion, this kind of nostalgia is what can make accessibility such a hard sell.
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>>> From: Steve Green <steve.green@testpartners.co.uk<mailto:steve.green@testpartners.co.uk>>
>>> Sent: Sunday, March 17, 2024 9:09 AM
>>> To: Michael Livesey <mike.j.livesey@gmail.com<mailto:mike.j.livesey@gmail.com>>
>>> Cc: David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk<mailto:forums@david-woolley.me.uk>>; 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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>>> 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.
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>>> The gov.uk<http://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.
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>>> 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.
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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 7:09 PM
>>> To: Steve Green <steve.green@testpartners.co.uk<mailto:steve.green@testpartners.co.uk>>
>>> Cc: David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk<mailto:forums@david-woolley.me.uk>>; 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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>>> We will have to agree to disagree, Steve.
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>>> 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.
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>>> 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?
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>>> 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.
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>>> 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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>>>>
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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.
>>>>
>>>> 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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>>>>
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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:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 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.
>>>>>
>>>>>
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