[Haskell-cafe] Gitter Haskell Community

[MarLinn]

On 2016-12-12 19:38, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> Am 12.12.2016 um 19:27 schrieb Mario Lang:
>> The digital divide is about to hit really hard with the next wave of 
>> new technology hype.  HTML + JavaScript was never designed to be an 
>> application development platform, and forcing it to be one does not 
>> make the job for assistive technology providers easier, in fact, it 
>> makes it virtually impossible. 
>
> That's one of the things I have been disliking about how the W3C has 
> been pushing Javascript instead of simply extending the set of 
> standard controls. What's also missing is UI design guidelines such as 
> those that have been established for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Most 
> webapps have a horrid user experience even for me, who is neither 
> blind nor colorblind nor mouse-precision-impaired, i.e. usability is 
> bad even for mainstream users.

Of course we are part of the problem. The general approach when it comes 
to Haskell on the web seems to be to throw some react and some ghcjs and 
some jquery and some god-knows-what together, and be done with it so you 
can get back to Haskell. I get that people want to stay in Haskell land, 
and these technologies are not bad per se, but we might have set the 
wrong incentives so that we rely on them too much. Most of the 
frameworks we have are absolutely not UI- or accessibility-oriented. If 
someone wants to create a static site with five pages, and it feels 
easier to rely on ghcjs+react with all its setup, have the user add 
three security exceptions, and then still crash the browser than it is 
to create five static pages, then we failed. Or rather, some parts of 
our community were too successful.

It's kind of funny how many of us use Haskell because we'd rather think 
ten minutes than debug for twenty, but when it comes to web stuff many 
of us still throw careful consideration overboard. It's probably because 
the whole web dev world is a bit bonkers. But if any community has the 
right people to add a voice of reason, I'd still think ours might be a 
strong candidate. Naturally it's not a really loud voice, but then we do 
have some great server libraries as a selling point.


Cheers,
MarLinn