Comment by j on "How do you deal with clients who think they know more than they do?"

Hmm I don't clearly understand where WCAG actually breaks with bootstrap. It's just a responsive layout framework with a class composition approach and some basic functionality.

It should have nothing to do with it, i don't like it that much either but I found out that a big portion of the people just don't know enough to actually build a responsive homepage.

That's it about the technology. I think your reasoning is not conclusive but taste. Bootstrap and WCAG are not mutually exclusive. But stupid applications of any approach can lead to failed results.

To your concrete problem, I agree with Milica she puts it very reasonable.

You are the expert you were hired to give them advice, if they want to push another agenda, you either don't have enough evidence or they are ignorant.

I would rather push on the principles of how WCAG works and not against a specific technology, but if you really can't stand it -> her approach seams to be the most professional to me.

The bootstrap is just an annoyance and part of what led them to the problem -- the big problem is the use of React in a CSR manner. CSR + no JS == a big white blank page.

Their IT guy was actually arguing against scripting off graceful degradation. Their marketing woman was arguing against legible colour contrasts because it 'has to match their print materials'.

It's a literal flashback to this time last year.. with another client where we fixed everything, and three days after we got them out of the courts? They undid all of it because their marketing department "said so". Next thing I know I'm giving a notorized deposition as a witness for the other side.

Really though the fact that what they did to bootstrap broke its responsiveness is the big problem -- as is SO common to people using front-end frameworks they folks who built this don't know enough about HTML, CSS, or JavaScript to be building websites.

Which is why they ended up with a 3 megabyte monstrosity spanning 71 separate files doing the job of 48k or less in two files. Seriously there's no reason for the average page to take more than 16k of markup, or for the entire SITE to have more than around 32k of CSS in one file. Worse they aren't doing anything I'd even be using JavaScript FOR client-side!

But what are they spitting out? 140k of HTML, 611 megabytes of CSS, and 2.6 megabytes of scripting.

But tell me again how much 'easier' those frameworks made things.

Jason Knight easier is a point of perspective, newer developers don't need to understand things anymore. Personally I view this as dangerous, but the industry sees a 'lack of qualification' and than of the lemming mentality of 'frameworks are much better maintained' which can be true but it also means vulnerabilities spread even further.

People don't tend to think about implicit consequences.

About react or to big payloads, 90% of the time I agree ... a company page which is not a highly interactive cockpit using asynchronous communication streams breaking the stable declarative model just to feel fancy.

That's idiotic, I still can see usecases where it helps / makes sense.

But in general yes .... if you can do it in 2 files html and 1 file css + 1 script you should solve it like that.

SSR and especially graceful degradation is one of the core concepts of stability! If possible the system should always provide the functionality, that's how system should work. The fragile parts should be put ontop the stable parts not the other way around.

That's why we use the declarative fault tolerant model of markup languages to not get into the 'compiler says no' problems.

But I would need more information to actually make a valid assessment :) in general I totally agree with you.

SSR and especially graceful degradation is one of the core concepts of stability! If possible the system should always provide the functionality

EXACTLY, and that's the problem. This one guy at their company -- the one making most of their tech decisions -- is OBSESSED with client-side rendering, and damn the consequences... to the point he just flat out refuses to admit there ARE consequences.

Though after today's meeting without him there, I may have just gotten the poor sod fired.

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