When will we ever have HTML5 apps that match native apps? When they actually let HTML5 apps do what native apps do, like multitouch without triggering a default action.
If you want to develop an app, develop an app, not a website. Use Electron or its mobile equivalents if you must.
Also, MS office and Adobe are web apps and far more complex than almost any "real apps" out there. It's completely untrue that web apps are not apps.
> Also, MS office and Adobe are web apps and far more complex than almost any "real apps" out there. It's completely untrue that web apps are not apps.
You can pretend they are until someone takes away your toys. Then, suddenly, your "app" cannot even process its own input. Or access the clipboard. Or do any of the other things that websites just aren't trustworthy enough for.
Yes, there is. The fact the user has installed it.
> Getting rid of js altogether is just throwing away the web to make it something poorly performing and requires sending all data back to the server - so not really a serious option.
Not the web, just webapps. The web will perform better afterwards.
> Browsers only exist to allow interaction with websites, and as such they should follow specs and allow them to be used.
Yes, but those specs have to be sane. Which means even a completely untrusted party – that's what a random website is – cannot abuse them.
> Websites are more important than browsers by definition.
Nonsense, either is useless without the other. Websites are content, browsers define how they're viewed.
Best change made in Safari in a long time. My eyesight is going and unzoomable websites were a serious accessibility issue.
If you give web developers any way to disable zoom they will disable zoom whether it's appropriate or not. With an app that gets human reviewed you can make rules like "this feature can only be used for full-screen games" but not on the web where there's one set of rules for everyone.
There are actual accessibility reasons for wanting to take control of pinch zoom behavior. As long as I'm actually catering to accessibility, if I have to be forced to use the OS pinch zoom to do that it's going to be LESS accessible. The OS pinch zoom only works for text and static 2D images and nothing else. If you try to OS-pinch-zoom a 3D object on a web page, it zooms the whole UI and not the object. That's a major accessibility problem for say a website that offers 3D models.
And no, I don't think "create an app" is the answer as another comment said. I want LESS apps, LESS spyware, and more in-browser, fully-featured, perfect mobile experiences designed in HTML5 because it's MUCH harder to invade privacy with HTML5 than it is with a native app, and if Apple would stop compromising HTML5 features, a huge number of mobile apps can be implemented in it.
Why doesn't it zoom the object along with the rest of the page?
If a website borks its usability/accessibility you as a user can decide not to use it. If it's a public service or a company there will be for sure pressure for it to conform to whatever accessibility standard is deemed appropriate. Developers in those situations will have to do the work they are hired to do.
Now saying that I should not as an independent developer customise certain behaviour or appearance in a browser (say scrollbars, or many others) to appease that arbitrary accessibility doesn't make sense. If I can't build a certain app (due to arbitrary constraints that have no security implications) then its accessibility is effectively reduced to 0 isn't it?
If I, as an idiot, want to build a website that screen readers won't be able to parse or will spew lines of William Shake-s-pear as image alt tags, isn't that my choice and am I not able already to do so?
As such, if I for instance wanted to write a game in a browser where some of these things are detrimental, and just can't because, no, accessibility, what does that net any one?
This patronising "we know better everything" is sincerely annoying.
It would be nice if web developers could be trusted to only disable zoom when it either does not impact accessibility or when making a website accessible is absolutely not possible. In practice, making an inaccessible website is often more profitable because it's less effort. Also, I've seen a lot of ordinary websites disable zoom for no real reason.
Important websites have to be accessible. So if your website would not be accessible anyway, it not existing may not be a gain for anyone but it isn't a big deal either.
And in many cases, it is better for a website to not exist that for it to be inaccessible: Market forces, your employer, school, university or state can require you to access a website that is not accessible to you. They cannot do that if it does not exist.
I don't want to write an app for it. By your logic websites should be plain text and we should all be learning N frameworks to do things that are way easier to do in a browser, available without having to install black box crap software on our devices.
It makes no sense, since you can do plenty of worse things than disabling zoom, in fact the browser allows a whole range of things that are not in the interest of users and they don't do anything to curb those, so your point is basically moot.
> In practice, making an inaccessible website is often more profitable because it's less effort.
This has no bearing in real accessibility, it's, as plenty of other things, a red herring, since real accessibility is not defined by zooming or changing your scrollbar appearance - as you can confirm by visiting a very large part of the internet.
> And in many cases, it is better for a website to not exist that for it to be inaccessible:
This is like, your opinion. Which besides being as the saying goes, isn't even backed by any rational argument. Just because you keep saying the same words they don't change reality, unless you're Dumbledore, and you're a character in a book, or a movie, and even then, it only changes the story there, not the story outside of it.
All the cases you mention can, and should be dealt with in legal terms - your school, employer, university, or state, are public entities, there can certainly be accessibility guides, references and standards, as there are in a multitude of others things, exactly to regulate that.
Your argument is like saying, that paper should not be used to draw, or do origami, or write in other languages because someone might not understand what it is, or what is contained in it. Of course, that's silly. And when it comes to government, schools, and public entities, according to the type of documents, printed and available in paper, they do have to follow a specific ruleset, without impacting what paper can be used for in other situations.
- Web apps don't require less trust than proper ones. Their developers can use dark patterns, abuse your data, etc.
- Cross-platform frameworks exist
- I have no idea why you think I mind hypertext
> This has no bearing in real accessibility, it's, as plenty of other things, a red herring, since real accessibility is not defined by zooming or changing your scrollbar appearance - as you can confirm by visiting a very large part of the internet.
Are you seriously claiming zooming is not an accessibility feature?
> This is like, your opinion. Which besides being as the saying goes, isn't even backed by any rational argument.
Please stop the flaming.
> All the cases you mention can, and should be dealt with in legal terms - your school, employer, university, or state, are public entities, there can certainly be accessibility guides, references and standards, as there are in a multitude of others things, exactly to regulate that.
Sure. And once there are strict accessibility laws, worldwide, that everyone follows, and all the legacy software has been replaced, we can give developers control over zooming again.
They do, mostly because the browser allows it.
> I have no idea why you think I mind hypertext
Perhaps a better model would be that the web shouldn't be hypertext by default (or can be something else), and instead that hypertext is one of the possible formats for something on the web, along with others - the web would be the "envelope" and not the definition of the content.
If you follow your line of thought to the end, then the conclusion would be that we should be left to pure hypertext.
> Are you seriously claiming zooming is not an accessibility feature?
No, I'm claiming that there's no reason to not allow someone to control the behaviour of certain parts of the browser when browsing a web property of someone else, as long as it doesn't pose a security risk. While at it, the browser could implement white listing of actions, data, and other details that the web property has access to without my consent. If I visit a website for a game and it tells me "this website is going to: - disable zoom - change your scrollbars - change the right click button; check which ones you agree/do you agree" there's no loss of accessibility. And the same for scripts, watching mouse input, text typing, hijacking the back button, showing me popups, etc. Of course that would be technically very challenging to implement.
> Please stop the flaming.
The first rule is if you don't like something done to you, you shouldn't do it to others. Once you do you have to man up.
> Sure. And once there are strict accessibility laws, worldwide, that everyone follows, and all the legacy software has been replaced, we can give developers control over zooming again.
Why do they need to be strict and before-hand?
Not zooming in when doing stuff unrelated to intent to zoom, is just not in their interest as determined by Apple.
This is a cat and mouse game. iOS 14 doesn't respect user-scalable=no or maximum-scale, unfortunately.
What you need to do is this now, if you don't want the web browser to respond to scaling (and as much as the idiots at Apple love their high horses, there are actual use cases for this, including when you are building a webapp or when you are building a web page with your own pinch zoom logic):
Basically, Apple tries hard to break HTML5 apps at every new iOS release.