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>

23

u/Expensive-Job-9419 9h ago

eli5?

117

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.

-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. 

18

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.

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.