r/technology • u/Choobeen • 9h ago

Software Trump appoints Airbnb co-founder to revamp public (government) websites

https://www.dw.com/en/trump-appoints-airbnb-co-founder-to-revamp-public-websites-after-musk-doge-exit/a-73744139
1.9k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

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149

u/Encomiast 9h ago edited 9h ago

The HTML of https://americabydesign.gov does not exactly inspire confidence that anyone over there actually knows what they are doing:

<span data-word-id="1-word-0" class="text-main-dark" style="transition:color 0.7s ease-in-out;-webkit-transition:color 0.7s ease-in-out;will-change:color">
    What's
</span></span>
<span><span data-word-id="1-word-1" class="text-main-dark" style="transition:color 0.7s ease-in-out;-webkit-transition:color 0.7s ease-in-out;will-change:color">
    the
</span></span>
<span><span data-word-id="1-word-2" class="text-main-dark" style="transition:color 0.7s ease-in-out;-webkit-transition:color 0.7s ease-in-out;will-change:color">
    biggest
</span></span>

80

u/ekun 9h ago

Holy fuck that is the real landing page for this initiative. LMAO

20

u/gizamo 8h ago

Jeezus. That's, well, something. Lol.

14

u/IM_KYLE_AMA 4h ago

This is a hacky, probably AI generated way to get the text to highlight on scroll. This is something that GSAP is used for but here they just cobbled it together themselves. This would have never been accepted by the US Digital Service.

22

u/Expensive-Job-9419 9h ago

eli5?

120

u/Encomiast 8h ago

It's…uhm, unusual to wrap every word in markup. It's super inefficient since all this duplicate text needs to be sent to the browser, it's hard to maintain, and it play havoc with screen readers, so it's not super efficient. And it's just ugly.

41

u/Kershiser22 8h ago

I think the old HTML WYSIWYG software was called Frontpage? When I messed with it ~20 years ago, my memory is that it would do stuff like this. If you made any change to your page, it would apply all the formatting to the new section.

7

u/erix84 2h ago

I used to use Frontpage just for drawing tables then I'd use wordpad or another text editor for everything else because i hated how Frontpage did literally everything else.

22

u/Regular-Engineer-686 8h ago edited 7h ago

This is like Frontpage all over again

1

u/Jumpy-Astronaut-3572 1h ago

Text could be normal in the source code. It is being split with the help of plug-ins like gsap or something. For admin it won't be hard to maintain but don't know about accessability.

-18

u/nicuramar 6h ago

Honestly, though, it’s a bit far fetched to criticize tiny details like that. There is plenty of stuff to criticize. 

This was clearly not written by hand but by some tool. 

16

u/joeyb908 5h ago

It is a valid criticism to judge basic html/css for a group that will supposedly modernize the governments websites.

This is quite literally week 2 of an html/CSS course in college. Someone with 0 experience should get this right.

11

u/bkirbyNL 5h ago

…written by some tool. Indeed it was.

2

u/Jeeefffman 1h ago

Government websites are supposed to be the most user friendly, because everyone should have easy acess to government information or the system won’t work.

Low quality code is bad for screenreaders, which excludes the site for a sizable amount of users/civilians.

20

u/erics0n 8h ago

Not a webdev, but probably the double span for each word. The parent for each doesn't really serve a purpose or at least not required in this case (just based off this, idk the actual css file, too lazy to check). Also, inline styling.

12

u/Encomiast 8h ago edited 8h ago

Also don't even get me started on using foot marks instead of real apostrophes. You go through the trouble of making your users download half a MB of font files, and proceed to treat it like this.

8

u/TinyFists-of-Fury 5h ago

Imagine a word processor: This is you styling every word in a sentence, one at a time and in the same way, instead of highlighting the entire sentence to style them altogether in one go.

5

u/epicfail1994 7h ago

Wrapped each individual piece of text in multiple redundant spam elements is….not good practice

8

u/Sloppy_Wafflestomp 7h ago

Totally overdone or AI?

16

u/Agile_Tomorrow2038 6h ago

That's how AI does 10k lines of code

13

u/BurningPenguin 3h ago

That's how AI does 10k lines of code unsupervised. These clowns are even too incompetent to delegate AI properly. Pure vibe coding...

2

u/ohnofluffy 57m ago

You forget they believe fully in their lord and master AI so they don’t think it needs to be checked. Like everything with Musk, he sells people on grand promises and then uses them like guinea pigs to solve its flaws and weaknesses. Airbnb Chode #1 is just rotten icing on this turd cake. Idiocracy at its finest.

3

u/meneldal2 2h ago

I thought "transition" was DEI, is that even allowed by Trump?

3

u/ATastyBagel 1h ago edited 1h ago

Holy fuck that’s awful. The overuse of span, the inline CSS rules, WebKit attributes. Most, if not all modern browsers, don’t really require that anymore and haven’t since HTML5 and CSS3 became the working standard.

*edited to see if I can format it a bit better

3

u/marx2k 1h ago

This hits me right in the 508

1

u/deadtone 1h ago

This is for the text effect where the color of the text changes when it’s in the browser viewport. Text can wrap so each word is checking. Browsers and computer are much faster than they were 20 years ago, messy vibe coded html runs fine. There are other issues.

1

u/alaynyala 14m ago

Fucking yikes

1

u/blue-coin 2h ago

You don’t actually believe someone wrote that by hand do you? That’s clearly markup from a CMS