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
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150

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>

22

u/Expensive-Job-9419 9h ago

eli5?

114

u/Encomiast 9h 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.

42

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.

6

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.

-17

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. 

17

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.

12

u/bkirbyNL 5h ago

…written by some tool. Indeed it was.

3

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.

18

u/erics0n 9h 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.

10

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