h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/

I've told this story at conferences - but due to the general situation I thought I'd retell it here.

A few years ago I was doing policy research in a housing benefits office in London. They are singularly unlovely places. The walls are brightened up with posters offering helpful services for people fleeing domestic violence. The security guards on the door are cautiously indifferent to anyone walking in. The air is filled with tense conversations between partners - drowned out by the noise of screaming kids.

In the middle, a young woman sits on a hard plastic chair. She is surrounded by canvas-bags containing her worldly possessions. She doesn't look like she is in a great emotional place right now. Clutched in her hands is a games console - a PlayStation Portable. She stares at it intensely; blocking out the world with Candy Crush.

Or, at least, that's what I thought.

Walking behind her, I glance at her console and recognise the screen she's on. She's connected to the complementary WiFi and is browsing the GOV.UK pages on Housing Benefit. She's not slicing fruit; she's arming herself with knowledge.

The PSP's web browser is - charitably - pathetic. It is slow, frequently runs out of memory, and can only open 3 tabs at a time.

But the GOV.UK pages are written in simple HTML. They are designed to be lightweight and will work even on rubbish browsers. They have to. This is for everyone.

Not everyone has a big monitor, or a multi-core CPU burning through the teraflops, or a broadband connection.

The photographer Chase Jarvis coined the phrase "the best camera is the one that’s with you". He meant that having a crappy instamatic with you at an important moment is better than having the best camera in the world locked up in your car.

The same is true of web browsers. If you have a smart TV, it probably has a crappy browser.

My old car had a built-in crappy web browser.

Both are painful to use - but they work!

If your laptop and phone both got stolen - how easily could you conduct online life through the worst browser you have? If you have to file an insurance claim online - will you get sent a simple HTML form to fill in, or a DOCX which won't render?

What vital information or services are forbidden to you due to being trapped in PDFs or horrendously complicated web sites?

Are you developing public services? Or a system that people might access when they're in desperate need of help? Plain HTML works. A small bit of simple CSS will make look decent. JavaScript is probably unnecessary - but can be used to progressively enhance stuff. Add alt text to images so people paying per MB can understand what the images are for (and, you know, accessibility).

Go sit in an uncomfortable chair, in an uncomfortable location, and stare at an uncomfortably small screen with an uncomfortably outdated web browser. How easy is it to use the websites you've created?

I chatted briefly to the young woman afterwards. She'd been kicked out by her parents and her friends had given her the bus fare to the housing benefits office. She had nothing but praise for how helpful the staff had been. I asked about the PSP - a hand-me-down from an older brother - and the web browser. Her reply was "It's shit. But it worked."

I think that's all we can strive for.

Here are some stats on games consoles visiting GOV.UK

Matt Hobbs (@TheRealNooshu@hachyderm.io)

@TheRealNooshu

Replying to @TheRealNooshuInterestingly we have 3,574 users visiting GOV.UK on games consoles:
• Xbox - 2,062
• Playstation 4 - 1,457
• Playstation Vita - 25
• Nintendo WiiU - 14
• Nintendo 3DS - 16

20/22

❤️ 29💬 1♻️ 010:45 - Mon 01 February 2021

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/

#HTML5 #web #WeekNotes #work

Quite some years ago (2008), we brought the #OLPC AKA the 100$ laptop to Ethiopia as pilot. A surprising thing happened. The laptops were often without battery power in the morning. A thing that wasn’t anticipated. It had two reasons. One was the keyboard LED (it was removed in later series). It was used by the parents to have a light at home. The other was a bigger surprise. The parents used the mesh networking to discuss market prices for their produce. Fascinating. 1/3

In which I discuss new-ish cheap-and-almost-perfect audio amplifier tech: D-class, PWM, and a remarkable TI chip: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/09/09/Next-Step-Audiophile

So, audiophiles should invest all their their money and time in speakers and room prep, because everything else is now commoditized.

Newsletter: The recent Second Circuit decision in Hachette v. Internet Archive is only the latest battle in the war on libraries and the freedom to read.

https://www.citationneeded.news/hachette-v-internet-archive/

#InternetArchive #HachettevInternetArchive #libraries #newsletter #CitationNeeded

Hey folks, next month there’s an angry & lighthearted book coming out with my name on the cover: “Standing on High Ground”. It’s an anthology of writing from people who were arrested protesting Canada’s awful “TMX” pipeline project. I’m an arrestee/ contributor & co-editor.
Here’s its official home: https://btlbooks.com/book/standing-on-high-ground
Here’s a blog piece full of background and pictures: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/09/08/Standing-On-High-Ground

This project means a lot to me and I’d appreciate anyone passing the word along.

#books #tmx

[BLOG] When sysctl took down my subnet

https://blog.yaakov.online/when-sysctl-took-down-my-subnet/

🆕 blog! “Yet another AI Racism example”

Here's a good pub-quiz trivia question - which Oscar-winning Actors have appeared in Doctor Who? It's the sort of thing that you can either wrack your brains for, or construct a SPARQL Query for WikiData0. I was bored and asked ChatGPT. The new Omni model claims to be faster and more accurate. But, in my […]

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/09/yet-another-ai-racism-example/
⸻
#DoctorWho #racism

New euphemism for being late: ‘BepiColombo’s journey to Mercury becomes even more epic’ http://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/BepiColombo/Fourth_Mercury_flyby_begins_BepiColombo_s_new_trajectory #astrodon

The Linux commands you should NEVER use
by @sjvn in 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20180220202812/https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/the-linux-commands-you-should-never-use-1712.html

OMG - kids today on learning that the 'save' symbol 💾 is a physical storage disk ...

Also OMG - me on recently learning that 'upper case' and 'lower case' refers to the physical case printers used to use to store their letters. How did I miss this?

At the height of One Million Checkboxes's popularity I thought I'd been hacked. A few hours later I was tearing up, extraordinarily proud of some brilliant teens.

Here's my favorite story from running OMCB :)

https://eieio.games/essays/the-secret-in-one-million-checkboxes/