mhoye3d ago

I get the snark, but "page has to load in x time on expensive device in expensive city"... where is the human? Your audience isn't a phone.

I know I've said this a lot, but I think about the NHS digital design standards all the time, about that presentation where their lead designer talked about finding agent strings for devices like the Playstation Vita and Opera for the Nintendo DS in their logs. About how the NHS site had to work for those people too, no matter what.

https://wandering.shop/@fugueish/116695409129543894

Show threadmhoye3d ago
"Your use case is, there's a fourteen year old in an emergency room at 3 AM. English is their second or maybe fourth language. They have a battered school Chromebook or a hand-me-down Android device that was the cheapest thing on the market six years ago or a PS Vita their parents don't even realize has a web browser, and they're trying to educate themselves in the middle of the single most terrifying night they've ever experienced. Your site needs to work for that person at that moment."
Show threadstgiga (they/them) 2d ago
@mhoye My friends in poverty can confirm this is a real thing.
Show threadstgiga (they/them) 
@mhoye When you are literally struggling to pay bills enough to be using a laundromat to wash your clothes, you are basically stuck with less-than-ideal device power and computing speeds, including bandwidth. You may even get a metered connection or heaven forbid a prepaid phone card internet, or you could be stuck with satellite internet in a remote and very cheap area of your state, or if it's wooded, stuck with non-fiber DSL, because satellite and HAM radio do not work for you, and cell coverage is spotty, and you aren't served by cable TV, and your landlines are too shitty for 56K. This shit happens in my area of California. Just a few hours away is Big Tech, but you go just a little outside that and it becomes a place where techbros would want to leave immediately. If you're in Silicon Valley, you're targeting the wrong area of the state. Never mind that red states tend to have MUCH shittier Internet than California as a whole due to deliberate technophobic underfunding and defunding. Don't host your shit in Southern states if you want it fast. They'll even try to censor your content when they aren't slowing it down. BellSouth ain't your friend, y'xll. The South is NOT the place for fast tech. Any job offer that requires me to move there will be sent trans furry art in response.

Of course, my main point is that not every user will be from a state or country that has fast Internet even if you're hosting shit in the hub of Big Tech itself. Even if your platform has relay servers IN the locations with shitty net speeds. Or abroad. Now, to be fair, I have broken this maxim on places of mine that look 1990s but under the hood do a fuckton of HTML5 shit. Even fucking 8-hexdigit RGBA. But then again I made a browser demo 3046 bytes in size, with 3045 possible. Then again BWTC32Key (http://b3k.me/b3k.htm for those without HTTPS and at https://b3k.sourceforge.io for those with it) could be minified a LOT from its 320032 byte size. That said it DOES fully follow PEP350 Codetags comments so... But at least ALL code is inside and it doesn't do any CSS funny business. The HTML5 just is what makes the File API (and Blob) work. Uint8arrays are involved, and I DID try to make the code not use the wack neo-HTML5 shit, like, it tries to avoid use of shit like let in JS. It runs in IE (well, enough to use as a password generator, and it needs decent IE). But it's not using shit like Web Workers and Promise. I bet even an ActionScript port could exist if you're into it. I've ran it fine on Opera Presto and fucking Pale Moon. I THINK Win2K K-Meleon and def KernelEx Firefox could run it.
BWTC32Key encode/decode a file

Jun 6 at 8:35amWeb
Show threadstgiga (they/them) 2d ago
@mhoye Some people really ARE stuck with their XP machines, or their PowerPC Macs from the local Goodwill. Or devices purchased at E-Waste places. Or electronics literally from the dump. Or that were in a dumpster. Like, seriously, people don't care if their tech is legacy when that is all they can own due to financial or geopolitical reasons. I can't STAND what Linux is doing in the kernel by listening to LLMs telling them to jettison a fuckton of drivers. Never mind that Gemini and Copilot get basic shit wrong, and ChatGPT does not understand that Magic 8-Balls are a completely mechanical contraption without any form of circuit inside them. AND YET, Linux says "let's see what AI tells us to drop for security next". It's fucking security theatre. The only things AI doesn't suck at in any way is upscaling. Minus DLSS5 of course. Also I may have gotten lucky. Oh and did I mention AI thinks anime art should be plasticky? At this point it feels like Linux is pulling a DOGE. Never mind that no, Linux didn't cure my acne. Linux dropping legacy shit for AI reasons is like cutting DEI programs to make the government more efficient. AND I'm an American, one who can't leave. A gay American at that. Did I mention that gay websites need to operate on the weaker devices, because a LOT of LGBTQ+ people due to systemic discrimination often can only afford shittier technology, and then of course you need to factor in secret phones that people use when in unsafe environments, and then you need to factor in that some gay people don't want to link accounts, among other factors. The thing is that if you axe legacy allowances for efficiency, you end up fucking over racial, ethnic, gender+sexuality, and other marginalized groups. Never mind that a LOT of assistive technology, physical and virtual, is not fast, nor is it new. People still may be using speech devices with fucking DECTalk voices on them, the American TDD system uses Baudot (though Punycode over it may be useful especially with UnifontEX) to this day while ASCII attempts have failed, bionic eyes go defunct due to company failure and yet replacements cost a bunch and may be hard to do too many times, some sites think ADA shit lets people gain unfair advantages, many screenreaders fumble on too-dynamic sites, JS overuse doesn't translate well to accessibility, and people on disability do not easily afford high-end technology or communication plans.

Like seriously, when it comes to deprecations, there are SO many DEI issues, it's not even funny. Even 2FA can be a problem for accessibility, and I have faced this firsthand at my university's disability testing center who was not granted a 2FA exemption.