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293 points ulrischa | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.212s | source
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8organicbits ◴[] No.42175935[source]
Kudos to BBC for investing in accessibility, and unfortunately discovering a nasty bug.

As an industry, why haven't we figured out how to make drop downs that consistently open for all users? Is accessibility just that hard? Are there web frameworks/web components BBC should be using that already handle this?

I've been wary (as a backend-focused full-stack developer) about tweaking the browsers components. There's so much nuance to how they work and the implementations are battle tested. The idea of creating a custom text box (for example) without doing extensive research of text box behavior across platforms seems ripe for failure. I notice broken copy/paste and dropped characters often enough (on major corporate sites too). Why are text boxes broken in 2024? React feels arrogant to me now.

Personally, I've tried to handle this with server-side templates, CSS frameworks like Bulma, minimal JS. It's not viable for sites demanding slick custom branding (vanity?) but my text boxes work and my site doesn't cost a fortune to develop. Is it accessible to BBC standards? I'm not sure.

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1. spookie ◴[] No.42176307[source]
Agreed. But ultimately many issues arise when user agents customize these elements in very dubious ways. It's ok for the most part, but there's a reason behind reset.css files, and I wager a more nuclear approach was used here to circumvent these issues completely.

I'm just trying to reason on their decision here.