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by pibaker 15 days ago
Can't upvote this enough. People have very selective memory of how the 2000s web worked. Every other website requires Flash just to show you a carousel of images. "Serious" business websites implemented in slow, buggy Java applets. iframes everywhere. Incredibly fucked up tables with no semantic meanings in your HTML just to do what modern flexbox now does in two lines. No one cared about accessibility of anything. Clicking on anything can get you pwned because you never updated your Flash player which has an RCE vulnerability. And yes, so many websites will tell you to use Internet Explorer for best experience.

I get being frustrated with some aspects of the modern web. But a lot of people are reminding of that Naomi Wolf tweet about how Belfast was calm and peaceful in the 1970s.
2 comments
neya 15 days ago
> People have very selective memory

> Every other website requires Flash just to show you a carousel of images. "Serious" business websites implemented in slow, buggy Java applets. iframes everywhere.

Do you see the irony? This is a very selective example by itself. The table based minimal HTML + CSS websites existed throughout the decades (even so today) which is what I'm referring to specifically.

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Timwi 14 days ago
> No one cared about accessibility of anything.

I'm not dunking on your whole argument, but as for this specific point: as someone who finds the mouse difficult to use and requires the keyboard a lot, the web definitely used to be a lot more accessible in this regard. There's no keyboard navigability anymore. And it would be so simple, just put an accesskey attribute on your buttons and textboxes. Nobody does it, anywhere.

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swiftcoder 14 days ago
> There's no keyboard navigability anymore. And it would be so simple, just put an accesskey attribute on your buttons and textboxes. Nobody does it, anywhere.

Nobody added those attributes in the 90s/2000s either, it's just that desktop apps (like browsers) all implemented keyboard navigation properly by default.

The real loss here isn't html authors being too lazy to add the attribute, it's that our modern desktop environments/apps stopped implementing keyboard navigation as a default

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