[pjc50]

No, the real problem is a tension between standardised, accessible, boring documents and the desire for flashiness. Being nonstandard helps a website "stand out", and helps the designer sell it to the commissioner of the design. Even if this doesn't help the actual users of the website.

Many customers have a sort of "print design" mentality where they want the website to look a particular way on their device, preferably a pixel-perfect match to something done in Illustrator. This was true in the Flash era, and it's still true today - that's why you get restaurants whose menu is only available as a PDF, a deeply mobile-hostile format, when just putting it on the front page would actually be easier and work better for the user.

[userbinator]

that's why you get restaurants whose menu is only available as a PDF, a deeply mobile-hostile format, when just putting it on the front page would actually be easier and work better for the user.

IMHO that's still better than making it an SPA, because the former at least can be easily downloaded and viewed locally. Another example I've seen is a recent redesign of a public transit site, where a simple HTML form and directory of PDFs (literally --- it was just the webserver's directory listing) for finding bus schedules was turned into an SPA that took a disturbingly long time to load and was filled with, as the sibling comment puts it, "flashy, user-hostile crap". The old design was unchanged since at least 1999, if not slightly before.

[buckminster]

A local restaurant had their menu redone in React! Not just React, but React done badly. Click on "Lunch Menu", say, and literally nothing changes for 30 seconds. Then the new page appears. I took a while to realise it wasn't completely broken. God knows how much they paid for it. It's awful.

Edit: I should add, this reactivity serves no purpose. It's a sit down restaurant. You can't order electronically.

[wlesieutre]

> that's why you get restaurants whose menu is only available as a PDF, a deeply mobile-hostile format, when just putting it on the front page would actually be easier and work better for the user.

That might be the case if the website were the only place where the menu goes, but they need a paper menu for in the restaurant and just putting a PDF of that is easier than also maintaining a second copy in a web-friendly format.

[Finnucane]

That's not really a good excuse, since the PDF is made from a source document that could be repurposed to be more web-friendly if they were willing to make a small amount of extra effort.

[wlesieutre]

Small for you, a person who hangs out on HN.

Even with a service like Squarespace, asking a restaurant owner to create a well-formatted digital version of the menu and keep it up to date with any revisions is a big enough ask that they can't be assed.

Having visually impaired friends who aren't well served by a PDF that doesn't respect their text size preferences and requires zooming way in and scrolling side to side to read each line, I wish that weren't the case. But that's where we're at.

[Finnucane]

Then it sounds like there's a missed opportunity for some clever person to develop a better system for these customers to use.

[paulryanrogers]

My guess is the problem is more that there are too many such systems in use. So unifying the process to make a paper and web change requires updating a thousand different solutions.

[Causality1]

I would be fine with every restaurant having a pdf menu because that would still be better than the modern approach of not showing a menu at all until you give them your location and start an online order. Frankly most of the time I just go to their Google Maps page where I can expect to find a photograph of the in-restaurant menu taken by a helpful reviewer.

[anoncake]

It's both. The problem is that 1. people want to make flashy, user-hostile crap and 2. Javascript etc. exist so they can. Getting rid of Javascript is hard but not as hard as convincing everyone to cooperate and therefore must happen.

[perl4ever]

For almost any small business, there are a few things I want that I would think would be standardized but people don't do them.

I want a menu, a phone number, an address, the hours they are open. Maybe an email address or other message sending interface. And I want those to be easy to access on a phone or on a PC. Slap a nice picture on it if you like, but keep the functionality. Why is that so difficult/rare? I mean, it must be that the average small business owner is focused on different things that having a straightforward way for customers to contact them and get basic information.