I also never met anyone who uses RSS

I forgot where I was writing that. Of course everyone on HN uses RSS.

Unfortunately using React will always be more attractive if you want be paid to work to someone.

I was trying to rewrite some UI library with html sometime ago following the W3C accessibility specs and found out a lot of patterns can’t be done with pure html and require javascript unfortunately.

like what?

Tabs, accordion, combobox. There is a whole lot more, these are just the ones I can remember now.

If we've concluded that's it's okay to have elements that change/morph, as we seem to with the introduction of things like details, a native tab-like element feels like a glaring omission. Tabs have been a long-standing UI pattern and forcing every site to implement their own is a nightmare for accessibility. (The page you're reading is maybe already in a browser tab.)

I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out less than half of the custom tab interfaces on the web failed from an accessibility standpoint. When considering ARIA guidance, I don't even think it's possible to build an accessible version in HTML alone.

Other people have recognized it's missing. Open UI has a draft spec for it[0] and CSS Tricks has an article from 2001 about Open UI's experiments with sections for tabs[1]. I have no idea what happened on this front, though.

[0] https://open-ui.org/components/tabs/

[1] https://css-tricks.com/newsletter/281-tabs-and-spicy-drama/

For tabs, see: https://lyra.horse/blog/2025/08/you-dont-need-js/#lyres-and-...

As far as I can tell, my implementation there fits the guidelines.

this article is quite good. Thanks!

Accordion behavior is discussed in the article in the "Accordions / Expanding Content Panels" section:

> Use the same name attribute on all related details (like radio buttons) to restrict only one open panel at a time

And tabs can be a <details>-based accordion with some creative CSS to adjust the layout (left as an exercise for the reader, but I could write up an example if that would be helpful!)

It won’t have the necessary keyboard shortcuts.

Yes, the tabs in a tabs pattern should be keyboard navigated using arrow keys (ironically not the Tab key).

Also, the summary for the currently open details element will have the wrong state, 'expanded' instead of 'selected'. And while a set of details can now have a maximum of one open at a time, you can't ensure exactly one is always open (without JavaScript) as the tabs pattern requires.

All of those can be done with pure html/css, eg. https://codepen.io/mikestreety/pen/yVNNNm

Yeah this is true at this point. A lot of more complex patterns require JS to be accessible to screen readers.

We still should do more with HTML and CSS! And reach for leaner solutions than React everywhere.

But be careful going for a pure CSS solution for things like tabs if you don’t understand the accessibility requirements.

(I wish the HTML spec would move faster on these common patterns!)

https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/ is my go to for accessibility requirements of components.

And yes, being able to do all of these in pure HTML/CSS would be awesome. Though we are getting there with things like `details` and the newer `popover` features which should make things like rich tooltips, menu buttons, etc. a lot easier to implement. IIRC, there are also several anchor CSS properties to make positioning a lot simpler.

Because JS isn’t a big mess?

Yes. But first lets reduce the mess from 3 big mess technologies to 1 and then we can working on replacing JS.

thanks. I was honestly asking, because I'm trying to catch up on CSS progress and am kind of surprised at stuff it can do now.

The meta about us page also says it is a privacy first company.

I guess this one of these ideas that most people believe is true that turns out to be actually false

Every word I said about alcohol is 100% true. And no, most people don't even know it to believe it. I don't know why you have to resort to blatantly lying in your comment.

If they are rate limiting you, it means they already started enshitfying the product before it is even profitable

I interpret it more that they're losing money on it and are trying to limit the bleeding.

Why would they enshittifiy?

Because that's peak extraction for the enshittifier

I don’t use AI for anything except translations and searching and I’d say 3 times out of 10 it gives me bad information, while translation only works ok if you use the most expensive models

I thought this was a meme for cultured games.

Notice it's for left-handed use.

Someone linked to the video - they have produced a right-handed version.

Left handed people also have a libido to take care of, after all.

You’re absolutely right, here’s the corrected code to prevent users from receiving 4 quadrillion dollars in their savings account

Do you really believe React is just javascript?

React is "just JavaScript" that you have to write in a very particular way, which the language in no way helps you enforce, for otherwise your "web app" will misbehave is bizarre and confusing ways.

There are no particular ways to code react where JSX is just JavaScript, it is not.

React is not the same thing as JSX. You can use React without using JSX and you can also use JSX without using React. This argument makes no sense from the get go.

It does not change the fact that JSX is not valid JavaScript and so 99.9% of React code is not valid JS.