Breaking Things, Fixing Things…
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Marcus is currently creating a showcase on how to build accessible SPAs in different JS frameworks, aka React and Vue. He is documenting everything he does and tries to find the best ways to solve certain problems and make the app as accessible as possible. This is a great idea which I absolutely support and I’m very much looking forward to see where he can take it.
Yet, while reading this latest article about the challenges and possible solutions for accessible routing in Vue, I couldn’t help but wonder why everything in this article sounds so wrong. I know of the issues with these frameworks, even though I have never dug in deep in either and for various reasons I’m not a big fan either.
These latest frameworks are so hyped, everybody seems to like them, yet I find that they do break everything the web does offer out of the box, as a default and for free. (Free as in beer as well as in zero overhead.) But to get these basics working in a framework like this, the behaviour of focus states and routes has to be fixed and worked around to eventually only arrive at a solution that has otherwise already existed since the beginning of the web.
What I understand and have seen many times over all these years, is that most things on the web start out as an experiment. New technologies are being created and time always tells if it’s been a good idea, a bad idea and if things will last until after the hype.
We need these experiments — whether failing or succeeding — to move the web and its technologies forward, but arguing that these frameworks are the holy grail, while discounting HTML and CSS, couldn’t be more wrong. While these frameworks do have their place, IMHO there is still some way to go for these frameworks to mature into something sustainable. Until then they will leave things broken and for some of us to fix.