The following applies to minimal websites that focus primarily on text. It does not apply to websites that have a lot of non-textual content. It also does not apply to websites that focus more on generating revenue or pleasing investors than being inclusive.
I realize not everybody's going to ditch the Web and switch to Gemini or Gopher today (that'll take, like, a month at the longest). Until that happens, here's a non-exhaustive, highly-opinionated list of best practices for websites that focus primarily on text. I don't expect anybody to fully agree with the list; nonetheless, the article should have *some* useful information for any web content author or front-end web developer.
Specifically, I focus on supporting *under-represented ways to read a page*. Not all users load a page in a common web-browser and navigate effortlessly with their eyes and hands. Authors often neglect people who read through accessibility tools, tiny viewports, machine translators, "reading mode" implementations, the Tor network, printouts, hostile networks, and uncommon browsers, to name a few. I list more niches in the conclusion. Compatibility with so many niches sounds far more daunting than it really is: if you only selectively override browser defaults and use semantic HTML, you've done half of the work already.
One of the core ideas behind the flavor of inclusive design I present is being *inclusive by default.* Web pages shouldn't use accessible overlays, reduced-data modes, or other personalizations if these features can be available all the time. Of course, some features conflict; you can't display a light and dark color scheme simultaneously. Personalization is a fallback strategy to resolve conflicting needs. Disproportionately under-represented needs deserve disproportionately greater attention, so they come before personal preferences instead of being relegated to a separate lane.
Another focus is minimalism. Progressive enhancement is a simple, safe idea that tries to incorporate some responsibility into the design process without rocking the boat too much. On top of progressive enhancement, I prefer limiting any enhancements to ones that are demonstrated to solve specific accessibility, security, performance, or significant usability problems faced by people besides me.
I'd like to re-iterate yet another time that this only applies to websites that primarily focus on text. If graphics, interactivity, etc. are an important part of your website, less of the article applies. My hope is for readers to consider a subset of this page the next time they build a website, and address the trade-offs they make when they deviate. I don't expect--or want--anybody to follow all of my advice, because doing so would make the Web quite a boring place!
Unlike the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the Techniques document does not list requirements; rather, it serves to non-exhaustively educate authors about *how* to use specific technologies to comply with the WCAG. I don't find much utility in the technology-agnostic goals enumerated by the WCAG without the accompanying technology-specific techniques to meet those goals.
One of the defining differences between textual websites and advanced Web 2.0 sites/apps is safety. Most browser vulnerabilities are related to modern Web features like JavaScript and WebGL. If that isn't reason enough, most non-mainstream search indexes have little to no support for JavaScript:
=> ./../../../2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes.gmi A look at search engines with their own indexes
The simplicity of basic textual websites *should* guarantee some extra safety; however, webmasters need to take additional measures to ensure limited use of "modern" risky features.
All of the simplicity in the world won't protect a page from unsafe content injection by an intermediary. Proper use of TLS protects against page alteration in transit and ensures a limited degree of privacy. Test your TLS setup with these tools:
If your OpenSSL (or equivalent) version is outdated or you don't want to download and run a shell script, SSL Labs' SSL Server Test should be equivalent to testssl:
=> https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ SSL Server Test
Mozilla's HTTP Observatory offers a subset of Webbkoll's features and is a bit out of date (and requires JavaScript), but it also gives a beginner-friendly score. Most sites should strive for at least a 50, but a score of 100 or even 120 shouldn't be too hard to reach.
A false sense of security is far worse than transparent insecurity. Don't offer broken TLS ciphers, including TLS 1.0 and 1.1. Vintage computers can run TLS 1.2 implementations such as BearSSL surprisingly efficiently, leverage a TLS terminator, or they can use a plain unencrypted connection. A broken cipher suite is security theater.
Consider taking hardening measures to maximize the security benefits made possible by the simplicity of textual websites, starting with script removal.
JavaScript and WebAssembly are responsible for the bulk of modern web exploits. Ideally, a text-oriented site can enforce a scripting ban at the Content Security Policy (CSP) level.
"default-src: 'none'" implies "script-src: 'none'", causing a compliant browser to forbid the loading of scripts. Furthermore, the "sandbox" CSP directive forbids a wide variety) of potentially insecure actions.
While "script-src" restricts script loading, "sandbox" can also restrict script execution with stronger defenses against script injection (e.g. by a browser addon).¹ I added the "allow-same-origin" parameter so that these addons will still be able to function.²
If you're able to control your HTTP headers, then use headers instead of a <meta http=equiv> tag. In addition to not supporting certain directives, a CSP in a <meta> tag might let some items slip through:
> At the time of inserting the meta element to the document, it is possible that some resources have already been fetched. For example, images might be stored in the list of available images prior to dynamically inserting a meta element with an http-equiv attribute in the Content security policy state. Resources that have already been fetched are not guaranteed to be blocked by a Content Security Policy that's enforced late.
=> https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#attr-meta-http-equiv-content-security-policy HTML Living Standard, Content Security Policy state
Please use progressive enhancement³ throughout your site; every feature possible should be optional, and scripting is no exception.
I'm sure you're a great person, but your readers might not know that; don't expect them to trust your website. Your scripts should look as safe as possible to an untrusting eye. Avoid requesting permissions or using sensitive APIs:
=> https://browserleaks.com/javascript JavaScript Browser Information (BrowserLeaks)
Finally, consider using your CSP to restrict script loading. If you must use inline scripts, selectively allow them with a hash or nonce. Some recent directives restrict and enforce proper use of trusted types.
=> https://web.dev/trusted-types/ Trusted types
=> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Content-Security-Policy/trusted-types CSP trusted types on MDN
Third-party content will complicate the CSP, allow more actors to track users, possibly slow page loading, and create more points of failure. Some privacy-conscious users actually block third-party content: while doing so is fingerprintable, it can reduce the amount of data collected about an already-identified user.
Some web developers deliver resources using third-party CDNs, such as jsDelivr or Unpkg. Traditional wisdom held that doing so would allow different websites to re-use cached resources; however, all mainstream browsers engines now partition their caches to prevent this behavior:
Be sure to check the privacy policies for the third party services _and_ subscribe to updates, as their practices could impact the privacy of all your users.
For embedded third-party content (e.g. images), give extra consideration to the "Beyond alt-text" section. Your page should be as useful as possible if the embedded content becomes inaccessible.
Nearly every Internet user has to deal with unreliable connections every now and then, even the top 1%. Developing regions lack modern Internet infrastructure; high-ranking executives travel frequently. Everybody hits the bottom of the bell-curve.
Reducing load time is especially useful to poorly-connected users. For much of the world, connectivity comes in short bursts during which loading time is precious. Chances of a connection failure or packet loss increase with time.
Optimal loading is a complex topic. Broadly, it covers three overlapping categories: reducing payload size, delivering content early, and reducing the number of requests and round trips.
HTML is a blocking resource: images and stylesheets will not load until the user agent loads and parses the HTML that calls them. To start loading above-the-fold images before the HTML parsing finishes, send a "link" HTTP header.
The browser cache is a valuable tool to save bandwidth and improve page speed, but it's not as reliable as many people seem to believe. Don't focus too much on "repeat view" performance.
Out of privacy concerns, most browsers no longer re-use cached content across sites; refer back to the "third-party content" section for more details. Privacy-conscious users (including all users using "private" or "incognito" sessions) will likely have their caches wiped between sessions. Don't focus too much on "repeat view" performance until after your "initial view" performance is good enough.
Furthermore: a high number of cached resources can decrease performance of the cache, causing browsers to bypass the cache:
=> https://simonhearne.com/2020/network-faster-than-cache When Network is Faster than Cache
The effect is especially pronounced on low-end phones and mechanical hard drives.
One way to help browsers decide which disk-cached resources to prioritize is to use immutable assets. Include the `immutable` directive in your cache-control headers, and cache-bust modified assets by changing their URLs.
The only external assets on my pages are images and a web app manifest (for icons); I mark these assets as "immutable" and cache-bust them by including checksums in their filenames:
```
cache-control: max-age=31557600, immutable
```
You can also keep your asset counts low by combining textual assets (e.g. CSS) and inlining small resources.
In addition to HTML, CSS is also a blocking resource. You could pre-load your CSS using a "link" header. Alternatively: if your gzipped CSS is under one kilobyte, consider inlining it in the <head> using a <style> element. Simply inlining stylesheets can pose a security threat, but the "style-src" CSP directive can mitigate this if you include a hash of your inline stylesheet sans trailing whitespace.
Consider inlining images under 250 bytes with a "data:" URI; that's the size at which cache-validation requests might outweigh the size of the image. My 32-pixel PNG site icon is under 150 bytes and inlines quite nicely. On this site's hidden service, it's often the only image on a page (that the hidden service replaces SVGs with PNGs; see the section called "The Tor Browser"). Inlining this image and the stylesheet allows my hidden service's homepage to load in a single request, which is a welcome improvement given the round-trip latency that plagues onion routing implementations.
Download size matters, especially on metered connections. There's no shortage of advice concerning minimizing this easy-to-understand metric. Unfortunately, it alone doesn't give us the full picture: download size is not the exact same thing as time taken to deliver useful content to users.
Google's answer to this problem is "Core Web Vitals" containing metrics such as "SpeedIndex". These metrics aren't useless, but they are incredibly naive.
> SpeedIndex is based on the idea that what counts is how fast the visible part of the website renders. It doesn't matter what's happening elsewhere on the page. It doesn't matter if the network is saturated and your phone is hot to the touch. It doesn't matter if the battery is visibly draining. Everything is OK as long as the part of the site in the viewport appears to pop into view right away.
>
> Of course, it doesn’t matter how fast the site appears to load if the first thing the completed page does is serve an interstitial ad. Or, if like many mobile users, you start scrolling immediately and catch the 'unoptimized' part of the page with its pants down.
>
> There is only one honest measure of web performance: **the time from when you click a link to when you've finished skipping the last ad.**
Understanding round-trips requires understanding your server's approach to congestion control.
Historically, TCP congestion control approaches typically set an initial window size to ten TCP packets and grew this value with each round-trip. Under most setups, this meant that the first round-trip could include 1460 bytes. The following round-trip could deliver under three kilobytes.⁵
Nowadays, servers typically employ BBR-based congestion control. It allows for regular "spikes" in window size, but the initial window size is still small.
HTTP/3 uses QUIC instead of TCP, which makes things a bit different; the important thing to remember is that *user agents should be aware of all blocking resources **before** finishing the earliest possible round-trip.*
Assume that your first impression must fit in the first kilobyte. Make good use of this golden kilobyte; most or all of it will likely be taken up by HTTP headers.⁷ Ideally, the first kilobyte transferred should inform the client of all blocking resources required, possibly using preload directives; all of these resources can then begin downloading over the same multiplexed HTTP/2 connection before the current round-trip finishes! Note that this works best if you took my earlier advice to avoid third-party content.
Apply these strategies in moderation. Including extra preload directives in your document markup might not help as much as you think, since their impact on page size could negate minor improvements. Micro-optimizations have diminishing returns; past a certain point, your effort is better spent elsewhere.
=> https://wicg.github.io/layout-instability/#sec-intro Layout Instability API
Avoid layout shifts by including dimensions in HTML attributes. The simplest way to do so is by including "width" and "height" values, but the "style" attribute could work too. I recommend staying away from the "style" attribute, or at least selectively allowing its use with the "style-src-attr" CSP directive.
### Other server-side tweaks
In-depth server configuration is a bit out of scope, so I'll keep each improvement brief.
Compression--especially static compression--dramatically reduces download sizes. My full-text RSS feed is about a quarter of a megabyte, but the Brotli-compressed version is around 70 kilobytes. Caddy supports this with a "precompressed" directive; Nginx requires a separate module for Brotli compression:
=> https://github.com/google/ngx_brotli The ngx_brotli module
When serving many resources at once (e.g., if a page has many images), HTTP/2 could offer a speed boost through multiplexing. HTTP/3 is unlikely to help textual websites much, so run a benchmark to see if it's worthwhile.
Consider caching static assets indefinitely with a year-long duration in their "cache-control" headers, possibly with an "immutable" parameter. If you have to update a static asset, cache-bust it by altering the URL. This approach should eliminate the need for an "etag" header on static assets.
Using OCSP stapling eliminates the need to connect to a certificate authority, saving users a DNS lookup and allowing them to instead re-use a connection.
Consider the trade-offs involved in enabling 0-RTT for TLS 1.3. On one hand, it shaves off a round-trip during session resumption; on the other hand, it can enable replay attacks. 0-RTT shouldn't be too unsafe for idempotent GET requests of static content. For dynamic content, evaluate whether your backend is vulnerable to replay attacks described in appendix E.5 of the spec:
If your site has any SVG images, the Tor browser will download these just like Firefox would (to avoid fingerprinting) but will not render them.
Additionally, hopping between nodes in Tor circuits incurs latency, worsening the impacts of requiring multiple requests and round-trips. Try to minimise the number of requests to view a page.
If you use a CDN or some overcomplicated website security stack, make sure it doesn't block Tor users or require them to enable JavaScript to complete a CAPTCHA. Tor Browser users are supposed to avoid fingerprinting vectors like JS and browser extensions, so requiring a JavaScript-based CAPTCHA will effectively block many Tor users.
Tor users are unable to leverage media queries or client-hints to signal special needs. Pages need to be as accessible as possible *by default*. This should be a given, but it's doubly important when serving fingerprinting-averse readers.
### Hidden services
To go above and beyond, try mirroring your site to a Tor hidden service to reduce the need for exit nodes. Mirroring allows you to keep a separate version of your site optimized for the Tor browser.
Normally, optimizing specifically for a given user agent's quirks (especially in a separate version of a website) is a bad practice; however, the Tor Browser is a special case because there's no alternative available: Tor users should all use the same browser to avoid standing out. On top of that, the Tor Browser sometimes pretends to have Firefox's capabilities: progressive enhancement and graceful degradation won't work when a browser lies about its functionality.
For example, my website's clearnet version uses some SVG images. Some browsers can't handle a given image format. The typical solution is to use a <picture> element containing <source> children of varying formats and a fallback <img> element using a legacy image format.
The Tor browser will download whichever format Firefox would, rather than whichever formats it actually supports. A <picture> element containing an SVG and a raster fallback won't help: the Tor browser will avoid fingerprinting by selecting the SVG format, not a fallback format. The image will not be rendered, so users will have downloaded the image only to see a white box.
I address the issue by not using any SVG images on my hidden service:
=> http://wgq3bd2kqoybhstp77i3wrzbfnsyd27wt34psaja4grqiezqircorkyd.onion/ My Tor hidden service (HTTP+HTML)
Lazy loading may or may not work. Some browsers, including Firefox and the Tor Browser, disable lazy-loading when the user turns off JavaScript. Turning it off makes sense because lazy-loading, like JavaScript, is a fingerprinting vector. Specifically, it identifies idiosyncratic scrolling patterns:
> Loading is only deferred when JavaScript is enabled. This is an anti-tracking measure, because if a user agent supported lazy loading when scripting is disabled, it would still be possible for a site to track a user's approximate scroll position throughout a session, by strategically placing images in a page's markup such that a server can track how many images are requested and when.
=> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/img#attr-loading <img>: The Image Embed element on MDN, the loading attribute
If you can’t rely on lazy loading, your pages should work well without it. If pages work well without lazy loading, is it worth enabling?
The scope of this article is textual content supplemented by images. In that context, I don't think lazy loading is worthwhile because it often frustrates users on slow connections. I think I can speak for some of these users: mobile data near my home has a number of "dead zones" with abysmal download speeds, and my home's Wi-Fi repeater setup used to result in packet loss rates above 60% (!!).
Users on poor connections have better things to do than idly wait for pages to load. They might open multiple links in background tabs to wait for them all to load at once, and/or switch to another task and come back when loading finishes. They might also open links while on a good connection before switching to a poor connection. For example, I often open several links on Wi-Fi before going out for a walk in a mobile-data dead-zone. A Reddit user reading an earlier version of this article described a similar experience when travelling by train:
Unfortunately, pages with lazy loading don't finish loading off-screen images in the background. To load this content ahead of time, users need to switch to the loading page and slowly scroll to the bottom to ensure that all the important content appears on-screen and starts loading. Website owners shouldn't expect users to have to jump through these ridiculous hoops.
A common objection to my case against lazy-loading is that users may be more likely to click a link than scroll to the bottom, so pages should prioritize pre-loading the link. Pre-loading a page's essential resources is fine. Speculatively pre-loading content on separate pages isn't.
Many users with poor connections also have capped data, and would prefer that pages don't decide to predictively load many pages ahead-of-time for them. The overlap between these two groups grows especially pronounced as data cap overages trigger throttling:
=> https://web.archive.org/web/20220402004738/https://nitter.pussthecat.org/yoavweiss/status/1195036487538003968 "In Japan, the web is slower towards the end of the month due to data caps"
Some go so far as to disable this behavior to avoid data overages. Savvy privacy-conscious users (including Tor Browser users) also generally disable speculative pre-loading since pre-loading behavior is fingerprintable.
Users who click a link *choose* to load a full page. Loading pages that a user hasn’t clicked on is making a choice for that user. I encourage adoption of “link” HTTP headers to pre-load essential and above-the-fold resources when possible, but doing so does not resolve the issues with lazy-loading: the people who are harmed by lazy loading are more likely to have pre-fetching disabled.
Moreover, determining the pages to prioritize for speculative pre-loading typically requires analytics and/or A/B testing. Enrolling users in a study (e.g. by collecting information about their behavior) without prior informed consent *in terms they fully understand* demonstrates a disrespect for their autonomy. Furthermore: analytics typically represent all users equally, when developers should be giving disproportionate attention to marginalized users (e.g., disabled users). The convenience of the majority should not generally outweigh the needs of the minority. Many marginalized don't wish to broadcast the fact that they have special needs, so don't rely on being able to figure out who's whom.
2. Yes, users could disable images. That's *their* choice. If your page uses lazy loading, you've effectively (and probably unintentionally) made that choice for a large number of users.
Pages should finish making all GET network requests while loading. This makes it easy to load pages in the background before disconnecting. I singled out lazy-loading, but other factors can violate this constraint.
One example is pagination. It's easier to download one long article ahead of time, but inconvenient to load each page separately. Displaying content all at once also improves searchability. The single-page approach has obvious limits: don't expect users to happily download a single-page novel.
Another common offender is infinite-scrolling. This isn't an issue without JavaScript. Some issues with infinite-scrolling were summed up quite nicely in a single panel on xkcd:
Infinite-scrolling makes it difficult for readers to find their old place upon re-visiting a page, thereby creating harsh consequences accidental navigation. WordPress documentation lists more problems:
=> https://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/handbook/markup/infinite-scroll/ Infinite Scroll: Make WordPress Accessible
=> https://addyosmani.com/blog/infinite-scroll-without-layout-shifts/ Non-JS adaptation; skip to "Accessibility concerns" section
A hybrid between the two is paginated content in which users click a "load next page" link to load the next page below the current page (typically using "dynamic content replacement"). It's essentially the same as infinite scrolling, except additional content is loaded after a click rather than by scrolling. This is only slightly less bad than infinite scrolling; it still has the same fundamental issue of allowing readers to lose their place.
I've discussed loading pages in the background, but what about saving a page offline (e.g. with Ctrl + s)? While lazy-loading won't interfere with the ability to save a complete page offline, some of these related issues can. Excessive pagination and inline scrolling make it impossible to download a complete page without manually scrolling or following pagination links to the end.
Deferring network requests is a bad idea, but there are other ways to improve large-page performance.
A similar image attribute that I *do* recommend is the "decoding" attribute. I typically use `decoding="async"` so that image decoding can be deferred.
=> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/Img#attr-decoding <img> decoding on MDN
Long pages with many DOM nodes may benefit from CSS containment, a more recently-adopted part of the CSS spec.
CSS containment allows authors to isolate sub-trees of the DOM. Combined with a property like "content-visibility", it enables browsers to defer rendering of less essential below-the-fold content. Try to avoid the "hidden" parameter when "auto" is better:
> content-visibility: auto is a more complex value than hidden; rather than being similar to display: none, it adaptively hides/displays an element’s contents as they become relevant to the user. It also doesn’t hide its skipped contents from the user agent, so screen readers, find-in-page, and other tools can still interact with it.
Leveraging containment is a progressive enhancement, so there aren't any serious implications for older browsers. I use it for my site footers and endnotes.
Using containment for content at the end of the page is relatively safe. Using it for content earlier in the page risks introducing layout shifts. Eliminate the layout shifts by calculating a value for the "contain-intrinsic-size" property. This is a comprehensive hide to calculating intrinsic size values, by Thijs Terluin of Teluin Webdesign:
In-page search (e.g., using "Ctrl + f") has been a basic feature in document readers well before browsers, and continues to be an essential feature today.
Web pages that hide content behind "show content" widgets are difficult to search through: users need to toggle "show content" for each item they wish to search. Often, in-page search highlights are hidden; Reddit's atrocious redesign is a serious offender.
=> gemini://seirdy.one/misc/find.png searching for the word "good" in the phrase "I wonder how much good a" when a "see more" link obscures the words "good a", before and after revealing the hidden text. From the Reddit redesign.
If you need to hide some content for performance reasons, I described a less hostile way to do so in the "other ways to defer content" section.
Searchability is another reason to prefer conveying information textually, when possible: video (especially without accurate captions), pictures of text, etc. aren't so easily searchable.
### The importance of proofreading
Correct, consistent spelling is important to readers who use search. In-page search doesn't currently pick up misspelled words. If in-page search implementations develop such a feature, some users may wish to sometimes turn it off; even Google Search implemented a "verbatim" mode for exact matches.
Moreover, some search implementations (such as the one built into Firefox) support case-sensitive matching. Inconsistent capitalization of proper nouns, acronyms, and initialisms can make searching difficult.
### Problematic overrides
Search is so essential to some users' ability to navigate that some desktop users enable "type-ahead" search, to automatically begin a search upon typing multiple characters:
=> https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/access/access/type-ahead/ Enable Firefox' "find as you type" feature
=> https://github.com/Foxy/chrome-type-ahead Chromium extension to enable type-ahead; note that it requires full-page access and performs script injection to work.
If you ignored my advice to avoid JavaScript, at least think twice before using it to define custom keyboard shortcuts which interfere with this type of functionality. I singled out type-ahead search, but there are countless other examples of uncommon keyboard behavior that JavaScript overrides interfere with.
Another problematic override is scroll-behavior. Enforcing smooth-scrolling (e.g., with the "scroll-behavior" CSS property) can interfere with the use of in-page search by slowing down jumps between matches. Rapidly darting around the page with smooth scrolling can cause motion sickness. Simply relying on users to override default behaviors violates the "inclusive by default" directive I encourage, since user preferences are fingerprintable and shift responsibility away from developers.
There's a complex solution to turn off smooth scrolling for unfocused elements, but it doesn't address separate issues such as anchor-link navigation:
I recommend setting the default font to "sans-serif". Avoid "system-ui": it causes issues among readers whose system fonts don't cover your website's charset.
=> https://infinnie.github.io/blog/2017/systemui.html Never, ever use system-ui as the value of font-family
If you really want, you could use serif instead of sans-serif; however, serif fonts tend to look worse on low-res monitors. Not every screen's DPI has three digits. Accommodate users' default zoom levels by keeping your font size the same as most similar websites.
To ship custom fonts is to assert that branding is more important than user choice. That might very well be a reasonable thing to do; branding isn't evil! That being said, textual websites in particular don't benefit much from branding. Beyond basic layout and optionally supporting dark mode, authors generally shouldn't dictate the presentation of their websites; that should be the job of the user agent. Most websites are not important enough to look completely different from the rest of the user's system.
A personal example: I set my preferred browser font to "sans-serif", and map it to my preferred font in my computer's fontconfig settings. Now every website that uses sans-serif will have my preferred font. Sites with sans-serif blend into the users' systems instead of sticking out.
### But most users don't change their fonts...
The "users don't know better and need us to make decisions for them" mindset isn't without merits; however, in my opinion, it's overused. Using system fonts doesn't make your website harder to use, but it does make it smaller and stick out less to the subset of users who care enough about fonts to change them. This argument isn't about making software easier for non-technical users; it's about branding by asserting a personal preference.
It's not a good idea to require users to automatically override website stylesheets to see their preferred fonts. Doing so would break websites that use fonts such as Font Awesome to display vector icons. We shouldn't have these users constantly battle with websites the same way that many adblocking/script-blocking users (myself included) already do when there's a better option.
That being said, many users *do* actually override stylesheets. We shouldn't *require* them to do so, but we should keep our pages from breaking in case they do. Pages following this article's advice will probably work perfectly well in these cases without any extra effort.
### Font fingerprinting concerns
Some people raised fingerprinting concerns when I suggested using the default "sans-serif" font. Websites could see which font this maps to in order to identify users.
I don't know much about fingerprinting, except that you can't do font enumeration or accurately calculate font metrics without JavaScript. Since text-based websites that follow these best-practices don't send requests after the page loads and have no scripts, they shouldn't be able to fingerprint via font identification.
Other websites can still fingerprint via font enumeration using JavaScript. They don't need to stop at seeing what sans-serif maps to: they can see all the available fonts on a user's system, the user's canvas fingerprint, window dimensions, etc. Some of these can be mitigated by Firefox's protections against fingerprinting, but these protections understandably override user font preferences:
=> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-protection-against-fingerprinting Firefox's protection against fingerprinting
Ultimately, surveillance self-defense on the web is an arms race full of trade-offs. If you want both privacy and customizability, the web is not the place to look; try Gemini or Gopher instead.
### Zoom and font size
Browsers allow users to zoom by adjusting size metrics. Additionally, most browsers allow users to specify a minimum font size. Minimum sizes don't always work; setting size values in `px` can override these settings.
In your stylesheets, avoid using "px" where possible. Define sizes and dimensions using relative units (preferably "em"). Exceptions exist for some decorations⁴ (e.g. borders), but they are uncommon.
Set font size and line-spacing with a percentage and a unitless value, respectively:
Accordingly, follow good practices for alt-text. Concisely summarize the image content the best you can, without repeating the surrounding content. Don't include significant information that isn't present in the image; I'll cover how to handle supplementary information in the next subsections.
The W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) offers a decision tree for writing alt-text. It's a little lacking in nuance, but makes for a good starting point:
=> https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/decision-tree/ An "alt" Decision Tree
Alt-text is a good start, but we don't have to stop there.
Note: this section does not include examples of its own. If you wish to see examples, look at the blockquotes, code snippets, and linkd images in the official version of this Gemini page. You're probably on it right now; if not, here's the canonical location:
=> gemini://seirdy.one/2020/11/23/website-best-practices.gmi An opinionated list of best practices for textual websites
On Gemini, much of this section applies to varying degrees. I typically employ this approach when linking to e.g. images. Sometimes, I even do this when linking to gemtext or HTML documents.
### Putting images in context
Alt text should be limited to describing content of the image. It lacks context. To make things worse, images can contain a great deal of information. Sighted people can "filter" this information and find areas to focus on; alt text should capture this detail. However, sighted users' understanding of this detail can be informed by surrounding less-essential detail.
Blind users might struggle to view images in context; they can't easily scan the text before and after an image non-linearly if there's no semantic connection between them.
> Try reading your screen through a drinking straw for an hour to get an idea of the limited context that a blind user has. You simply cannot scan the entire page at a glance with a screenreader - you have to listen to the structure of it carefully and remember all that, or read through the entire thing to find stuff, unless there are explicit associations such as longdesc.
=> https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Feb/0069.html -- Charles McCathieNevile on the W3C's public-html mailing list
Being sighted and loading images can introduce issues of its own. Sometimes, sighted readers might focus on the *wrong* part of an image. How can you give readers the missing context and tell them what to focus on?
2. After the image, describe your interpretation of important details.
This is somewhat similar to the way most students in primary and secondary schools are taught to cite evidence in essays. On that note: remember that these are weak norms, not rules. Deviate where appropriate, just as students should as they learn to write.
### Figures
A *figure* is any sort of self-contained information that is referenced by--but somewhat distinct from--body content. Items that make for good figures are often found in floating blocks of print material.
Consider using a <figure> element when employing the previous section's two-part strategy. Place one of the two aforementioned pieces of information in a <figcaption>; the caption can come before or after the image.
Figures aren't just for images; they're for any self-contained referenced content that's closer to the surrounding body than an <aside>. Where appropriate, use figures for:
* Some equations, captioned with brief explanations of their behavior, purpose, or significance (equations should also have alt-text!)
Figures and captions have loose guidelines, and nearly everything I said on the matter is full of exceptions. A figure need not have a caption, but the majority benefit from one. It need not contain a single main element, but most probably should.
I personally try to maintain the flow of an article even if its figures and captions are completely removed or moved to an appendix. A figure is a "self-contained" block: user agents may re-position figure captions relative to the main figure content, or move the entire figure elsewhere; this is especially common in reading-mode implementations (see the "Non-browsers: reading mode" section). The HTML specification explicitly notes this behavior.
> When a figure is referred to from the main content of the document by identifying it by its caption (e.g., by figure number), it enables such content to be easily moved away from that primary content, e.g., to the side of the page, to dedicated pages, or to an appendix, without affecting the flow of the document.
> If a figure element is referenced by its relative position, e.g., "in the photograph above" or "as the next figure shows", then moving the figure would disrupt the page's meaning. Authors are encouraged to consider using labels to refer to figures, rather than using such relative references, so that the page can easily be restyled without affecting the page's meaning.
=> https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/grouping-content.html#the-figure-element HTML specification, the figure element
If the image is a screenshot of text from a website, link to that website to allow users to read its contents in context; this can serve as an "image transcript" of sorts.
A "longdesc" attribute used to be another way to reference an image transcript. The "longdesc" attribute contained a hyperlink (often an anchor link) to a location with more information about an image. This attribute has been obsoleted:
=> https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/obsolete.html#non-conforming-features HTML Living Standard: non-conforming features
The recommended way to link to a transcript is by hyperlinking the image (i.e., wrapping it with <a>). Put a short summary in the alt-text, and mention that the hyperlink contains a transcript.
The xkcd comic included earlier in the page had this alt-text:
```
Comic illustrating how if books worked like infinite-scrolling webpages, we'd have to turn pages carefully or risk losing the page. Follow link for transcript.
```
Image transcripts also help users relying on machine-translation, since translation tools rely on textual content (OCR is error-prone). These users won't read alt-text; have an alternative way to discover a transcript. Wherever you put the transcript, ensure it's semantically connected to the image. I linked a transcript in the figure caption.
Some users' browsers set default page colors that aren't black-on-white. For instance, Linux users who enable GTK style overrides might default to having white text on a dark background. Websites that explicitly set foreground colors but leave the default background color (or vice-versa) end up being difficult to read. The same phenomenon occurs on pages with text on top of background images. Don't strain your eyes trying to read this example:
This is an unreadable screenshot of a website promoting browser style overrides:
=> http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ Better Motherfucking Website (see the "A little less contrast" section)
I had set my browser foreground and background colors to white and dark gray, respectively. The website overrode the foreground colors while assuming that everyone browses with a white background.
Even if you set custom colors, ensure that the page is compatible with color overrides: elements shouldn't be distinguished solely by foreground and background color. Technique C25 of the *Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2* describes how doing so can meet the WCAG 2.2's Success Criterion 1.4.8. Specifically, it describes using default colors in combination with visible borders. The latter helps distinguish elements from surrounding content without relying on a custom color palette.
=> https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/css/C25 Technique C25: Specifying borders and layout in CSS to delineate areas of a Web page while not specifying text and text-background colors
The Web version of this page is an example application of Technique C25 and the similar G148:
=> https://seirdy.one/2020/11/23/website-best-practices.html The Web mirror of this Gemlog post
=> https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/general/G148 Technique G148: Not specifying background color, not specifying text color, and not using technology features that change those defaults
The Web version of this page only uses non-default colors when a user agent requests a dark color scheme (using the "prefers-color-scheme" CSS media query; see the next subsection) and for lightening borders. Any image with a solid background may match the page background; to ensure that their dimensions are clear, I surrounded them with borders. I also set a custom color for the borders and ensure that the image backgrounds don't match the border colors. I included borders further down to break up next/prev post navigation as well as separate footers, since these elements lack heading-based delineation. When overriding color schemes or disabling CSS altogether, the page layout remains clear.
Color overrides go well beyond simple foreground and background color changes. Windows' High Contrast Mode (HCM), for instance, makes more advanced modifications:
=> https://accessabilly.com/accessibility-issues-concerning-windows-high-contrast-mode/ Accessibility issues concerning Windows HCM
In fact, the CSS Working Group is working on a specification for re-coloring websites:
=> https://drafts.csswg.org/css-color-adjust-1/ CSS Color Adjustment Module Level 1
The Chromium team's in-progress auto dark mode will use this specification to darken websites globally:
=> https://chromestatus.com/feature/5672533924773888 Feature: Auto Dark Mode & support for "only" in CSS color-scheme
Websites can opt out with the "color-scheme" property, but they really shouldn't have to: stylesheets should be robust enough to handle re-coloring.
When setting colors, especially for a dark background, I recommend checking your page's contrast using Advanced Perceptual Contrast Algorithm (APCA) values. You can do so in an online checker or Chromium's developer tools (you might have to enable them in a menu for experimental preferences.
Note that the APCA isn't fully mature as of early 2022. Until version 3.0 of the WCAG is ready, pages should also conform to the contrast ratios described in the WCAG 2.2's success criteria 1.4.3 (Contrast: Minimum, level AA) or 1.4.6 (Contrast: Enhanced, level AAA).
CSS filters such as "invert" are expensive to run, so use them sparingly. Simply inverting your page's colors to provide a dark theme could slow it down or cause a user's fans to spin.
Darker backgrounds draw less power on devices with OLED screens; however, backgrounds should never be solid black. White text on a black background causes halation, especially among astigmatic readers. Halation comes from the word "halo", and refers to a type of "glow" or ghosting around words. There has been some experimental and plenty of anecdotal evidence to support this:
=> https://www.laurenscharff.com/research/AHNCUR.html Hill, Alyson (supervised by Scharff, L.V.) Readability Of Websites With Various Foreground / Background Color Combinations, Font Types And Word Styles, 1997
=> https://jessicaotis.com/academia/never-use-white-text-on-a-black-background-astygmatism-and-conference-slides/ Never Use White Text on a Black Background: Astygmatism and Conference Slides
"Just disable dark mode" is a poor response to users complaining about halation: it ignores the utility of dark themes described at the beginning of this section.
If you can't bear the thought of parting with your solid-black background, worry not: there exists a CSS media feature and client-hint for contrast preferences, called "prefers-contrast". It takes the parameters "no-preference", "less", and "more". You can serve increased-contrast pages to those who request "more", and vice versa. Check these docs for more information:
I personally like a foreground and background of "#eee" and "#0e0e0e", respectively. These shades seem to be as far apart as possible without causing accessibility issues: "#0e0e0e" is barely bright enough to create a soft "glow" capable of minimizing halos among slightly astigmatic users, but won't ruin contrast on cheap displays. I also support a "prefers-contrast: less" media query which lightens the background to "#222".
Color palettes need to be effective for different types of vision deficiencies (e.g. color blindnesses) and screens. Color blindness is a far more nuanced topic than "the inability to see some colors". Rob Pike explains his experience with color blindness:
=> https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2020/09/color-blindness-is-inaccurate-term.html Color blindness
Different screens and display-calibrations render color differently; what may look like a light-gray on a cheap monitor could look nearly black on a high-end OLED screen. Try to test with both high- and low-end displays, especially when designing a dark color scheme.
Color schemes should also look good to users who apply gamma adjustments. Most operating systems and desktop environments bundle a feature to lower the screen color temperature at night, while some individuals may select a higher one in the morning.
Underlines also make it easy for color-blind readers to distinguish both the beginnings and ends of links. A basic WCAG Level A requirement is for information to not be conveyed solely through color:
lossy PNG compression. Can reduce the size of the color palette.
=> https://github.com/shssoichiro/oxipng Oxipng
Lossless PNG compression. It's like a parallelized version of OptiPNG that also supports an implementation of ZopfliPNG compression
=> https://github.com/tjko/jpegoptim jpegoptim
Lossless or lossy JPEG compression. Note that JPEG is an inherently lossy format; the lossless features of jpegoptim only shrinks the size of existing JPEG files by removing unnecessary metadata.
The reference WebP encoder; has dedicated lossless and lossy modes. Lossy WebP compression isn't always better than JPEG, but lossless WebP consistently beats PNG.
The reference AVIF encoder, included in libavif.⁹ AVIF lossless compression is typically useless, but its lossy compression is pretty unique in that it leans towards detail removal rather than introducing compression artifacts. Note that AVIF is not supported by Safari or most WebKit-based browsers.
For lossy compression, I typically use GNU Parallel to mass-generate images using different options before selecting the smallest image at the minimum acceptable quality. Users who’d rather avoid the command line while performing lossy compression can instead check out Squoosh, a JavaScript app that bundles WebAssembly-compiled encoders; I’ve heard good things about it.
You also might want to use the HTML <picture> element, using JPEG/PNG as a fallback for more efficient formats such as WebP or AVIF, but only if the size savings are more significant than a couple hundred bytes.
6. Create a lossy AVIF image from the cropped full-color PNG, and include it in the <picture> element if it's smaller than the WebP. If color isn't important, use the YUV400 color space.
Here's a sample command to compress a PNG using ImageMagick, pngquant, and oxipng. It shrinks the image, turns it grayscale, reduces the color palette, and then applies lossless Zopfli compression:
In general, avoid loading images just for decoration. Only use an image if it has a clear purpose that significantly adds to the content in a way that text can't replace, and provide alt-text as a fallback. Any level of detail that isn't necessary for getting the point across should be removed by lossy compression and cropping.
If you want to include a profile photo (e.g., if your website is part of the IndieWeb and uses an [h-card](https://microformats.org/wiki/h-card)), I recommend re-using one of your favicons. Doing so should be harmless since most browsers will fetch and cache favicons anyway.
Some conventional wisdom for image compression doesn't hold up when compressing this aggressively; for instance, I've found that extremely aggressive dithering and PNG compression of small black-and-white images consistently surpasses JPEG compression.
Most resources on image optimization recommend considering progressive rendering. I don't recommend progressive rendering for below-the-fold images; if you optimize an image to just a few kilobytes, it should fully load in time. It's not worth the overhead below the 20 kb range.
These resources also encourage authors to include different image variants for different viewport sizes, screen resolutions, and pixel densities. They often skip the caveats:
* Using different image files for different viewport sizes can cause the page to request more images as users re-size their window.
* Sending requests dependent on viewport and display characteristics is a fingerprinting vector, allowing servers to identify users by these properties.
Rather than create separate lanes for different users, I prefer making the defaults as inclusive as possible. A single image should look good under a variety of downscaling algorithms. It should be as small as it can be without losing essential information.
It might seem odd to create a lossless WebP from a lossy PNG, but I've found that it's often the best way to get the smallest possible image at the minimum acceptable quality for screenshots containing solid backgrounds.
Bright images on an otherwise dark page distract readers, especially readers like me with ADHD. The human iris adjusts to average amounts of light; an object far brighter than its surroundings causes eye strain even among readers with healthy vision.
A <picture> element allows selection of sources based on any CSS media query. When images have light backgrounds, I like to include dark variants to complement a dark stylesheet.
Requiring the "screen" media type prevents selection of dark variants when printing. Printer paper is almost always white, so dark images could waste ink. Ink waste is a sensitive issue among many students: school printers sometimes charge students who exceed a given ink quota. Ask me how I know!
Light and dark variants of legacy formats (PNG, JPG, GIF), WebP, and AVIF can cause some of my "<picture>" imagesets to have up to six image variants. I could fully automate the process using my static site generator (Hugo) if I wanted to. Since I do want to inspect each image and compress to the minimum acceptable quality, I settled for partial automation using shell scripts and a Hugo shortcode:
=> https://git.sr.ht/~seirdy/seirdy.one/tree/master/layouts/shortcodes/picture.html My shortcode for <picture> elements
I only recommend using SVG in images; not embeds, objects, or directly in the body. Remember that users may save images, and open them in a non-browser image viewer with reduced SVG compatibility. To maintain maximum compatibility, stick to the subset of SVG Static’s secure static processing mode that appears in the SVG Tiny Portable/Secure (PS) spec. SVG Tiny PS is a subset of SVG Tiny 1.2, which is a supported export format in most vector drawing programs.
The above advice might seem daunting, but it’s usually easy to use existing tools to generate an SVG Tiny file and manually edit it to support the SVG secure static mode. SVGs that conform to this subset should be compatible with Qt5's SVG implementation, librsvg (used by Wikipedia and GNOME), and most operating systems' icon renderers.
This is possibly the most subjective item I'm including, and the item with the most exceptions. Consider it more of a weak suggestion than hard advice. Use your own judgement.
The first or second heading in the DOM, and the highest heading level, should be the page title marking the start of your main content (i.e. it should come after the site title, site navigation links, etc). Only if this is impossible should you consider adding a "skip link" instead. Visually-impaired users generally prefer navigating by headings.
A simple layout looks good at a variety of window sizes, rendering responsive layout changes unnecessary. Textual websites really don't need more than a single column; readers should be able to scan a page top-to-bottom, left-to-right (or right-to-left, depending on the locale) exactly once to read all its content. Verify this using the horizontal-line test: mentally draw a horizontal line across your page, and make sure it doesn't intersect more than one (1) item. Keeping a single-column layout that doesn't require responsive layout changes ensures smooth window re-sizing.
Exceptions exist: one or two very simple responsive changes won't hurt. The main anti-patterns are adjusting the relative order of elements, and layout shifts dramatic enough to cause confusion.
For example, the only responsive layout change on my website (https://seirdy.one) is a single CSS declaration to switch between inline and multi-line navigation links at the top of the page:
Sidebars are probably unnecessary, and can be quite annoying to readers who re-size windows frequently. This is especially true for tiling window manager users like me: we frequently shrink windows to a fraction of their original size. When this happens to a website with a sidebar, one of two things happens:
1. The site's responsive design kicks in: the sidebar vanishes and its elements move elsewhere. This can be quite CPU-heavy, as the browser has to both re-wrap the text *and* handle a complex layout change. Frequent window re-sizers will experience lag and battery loss, and might need a moment to figure out where everything went.
2. The site doesn't use responsive design. The navbar and main content are now squeezed together. Readers will probably close the page.
Common items in sidebars include tag clouds, an author bio, and an index of entries; these aren't useful while reading an article. Consider putting them in the article footer or--even better--dedicated pages. This does mean that readers will have to navigate to a different page to see that content, but they probably prefer things that way; almost nobody who clicked on "An opinionated list of best practices for textual websites" did so because they wanted to read my bio.
Don't boost engagement by readers information they didn't ask for; earn engagement with good content, and let readers navigate to your other pages *after* they've decided they want to read more.
Keeping an identical source order, DOM order, and visual order should also result in a logical tab-order. Just to be sure, always test the order of keyboard-driven focus.
Measuring tab-order is nice, but it doesn't go far enough. Users of switch access controls find it slow and frustrating to navigate long lists of focusable items.
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switch_access Switch access on Wikipedia
Screen readers make it difficult to consume poorly-organized content non-linearly. The list goes on: nearly every reader reliant upon assistive technologies struggles to skim through poorly-organized pages.
Related items need to be semantically grouped together. Group navigation links together in <nav> elements; sections under headings, <section> elements, or other landmarks; lists under <ol>, <ul>, or <dl>; etc. to give assistive technologies the means to skip over multiple items at once.
However, studies seem to have mixed results; some people find it easier to read lines around 90 characters long, while others struggle beyond the 50-character mark. I think the WCAG over-simplified simplified a complex issue. Then again, the AAA level was never intended to be a requirement.
Some of my links display long link-text; short line lengths can break these link texts too much, which can slightly hurt readability. Of course, narrow viewports will obviously make short line lengths non-negotiable. I decided to give article bodies a width of 38em, which typically corresponds to just under 90 characters. I opted to use "em" instead of "ch" for consistency and for better compatibility with some uncommon browsers (NetSurf, Dillo, and others).
I also ensured that my site supports CSS overrides, window-resizing, zoom levels past 200%, and most "reading mode" implementations. This should help accommodate a wide range of line-length preferences while still looking accessible enough by default.
When setting max line lengths, use a CSS media query to ensure that printed versions of a page use the full page width. This should save some paper. I opted to wrap all max-width rules in a media query to ensure that they only get called for the "screen" media type:
As words-per-line decrease (by increasing zoom or narrowing the viewport), line lengths grow more varied. Justifying text will cause uncomfortable amounts of whitespace. In fact, "Text is not justified" is explicitly mentioned in Success Criterion 1.4.8.
A single element wider than the viewport will trigger horizontal scrolling for the entire page. This is especially problematic for long pages that already require excessive vertical scrolling.
Not every phone has a giant screen: millions of people around the world use Web-enabled feature phones. The Jio Phone 2, for instance, is narrow enough to fall through a belt loop: it sports a screen that's just over 3.6 cm (1.44 inches) wide. Furthermore, some programs sport browser windows in sidebars:
Long words, especially in headings, can trigger horizontal overflow. Test in a viewport that's under 240 pixels wide (DPR=1) and observe any words that trail off of the edge of the screen. Add soft hyphens to these words using the "­" entity.
Most modern browsers support the "hyphens" CSS 3 property, but full automatic hyphenation is usually an overkill solution with a naive implementation. Automatic hyphenation will insert hyphens wherever it can, not necessarily between the best syllables. At the time of writing, humans are still better at hyphenating than most software implementations. I'm also not aware of a CSS property that only breaks syllables when necessary to avoid horizontal scrolling.
Users employing machine translation will not benefit from your soft hyphens, so don't expect them to always work as intended. Translation tools might also replace short words with long ones. Soft hyphens and automatic hyphenation are both flawed solutions, but I find soft hyphens to be less problematic.
Where long inline "<code>" elements can trigger horizontal scrolling, consider a scrollable "<pre>" element instead. Making a single element horizontally scrollable is far better than making the entire page scrollable in two dimensions.
Soft hyphens are great for splitting up text, but some text should stay together. The phrase "10 cm", for instance, would flow poorly if "10" and "cm" appeared on separate lines. Splitting text becomes especially painful on narrow viewports. A non-breaking space keeps the surrounding text from being re-flowed. Use the " " HTML entity:
```
10 cm
```
Practical Typography⁸ describes where to use the non-breaking space in more detail:
One exception to Practical Typography's rules: don't use a non-breaking space if it would trigger two-dimensional scrolling on a narrow viewport. Between broken text and two-dimensional scrolling, broken text is the lesser evil. I personally set a cutoff at 2.5 cm (1 inch) at 125% zoom.
You should only use pictures of text when the visual presentation of the text is part of the information you're trying to convey. Always be sure to test how such an image looks on a narrow screen.
Images do not reflow their text. When the viewport is narrower than the image dimensions, two options arise:
1. Allow the image to exceed the viewport width, triggering two-dimensional scrolling for the whole page.
I already covered the first option in the prior subsection. If you expect viewers to read the text in the image and you don't link an image transcript, the second option isn't ideal.
The best compromise is to ensure that the image isn't too wide, and can support large text on a narrow viewport. Lines of text in images should contain as few characters as possible. For a good exmple, see the "In defense of link underlines" section.
Most browser default stylesheets were not optimized for narrow viewports, so narrow-viewport optimization is one of few good reasons to override the defaults. The best example of widescreen bias in browser stylesheets is indentation.
The HTML spec's blockquote section recommends placing a <blockquote> element inside a <figure> and citations in a <figcaption> to show a semantic relationship between a quotation and its citation:
=> https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/grouping-content.html#the-blockquote-element HTML living standard: Grouping Content, section 4.4.4
Browser default stylesheets typically give <figure> elements extra margins on the left and right. <blockquote> elements have a large indent. Combining these two properties gives the final quotation an excessive visual indent, wasting precious vertical screen space. When quoted text contains list elements (<ol>, <dl>, <ul>), the indentation alone may fill most of a narrow viewport!
I chose to remove the margins in <figure> elements for quotations. If you're reading the Web version of this page with its own stylesheet enabled, in a CSS 3 compliant browser, you might notice that the blockquotes on it have a minimal indent and a thick gray border on the left rather than a full indent. These two adjustments allow blockquotes containing bulleted lists to fit on most narrow viewports, even when wrapped by a <figure> element. Browsers that do not support CSS 3 properties such as "padding-inline-start" will render quoted text using default stylesheets (probably with an indent), which are perfectly usable if a bit inconvenient.
Another example: outside the Web, I prefer indenting code with tabs instead of spaces. Tab widths are user-configurable, while spaces aren't. HTML pre-formatted code blocks, however, are best indented with two spaces. Default browser stylesheets typically represent tabs with an excessive indent, which can be annoying on narrow viewports.
Small phones typically support display rotation. When phones switch to landscape-mode, vertical space becomes precious. Fixed elements (e.g. dickbars) become a major usability hazard. Ironically, the WCAG’s own interactive Techniques reference is a perfect example of how fixed elements impact usability on short screens.
=> gemini://seirdy.one/misc/wcag_quickref.png Website with a banner covering the top half of the screen.
When filtering criteria on the Quickref Reference page, a dickbar lists active filters. I increased the zoom level; you may have to add more filters to fill the screen with a smaller font.
Designers often use figures to “break up” their content, and provide negative space. This is good advice, but I don’t think people pay enough attention to the flipside: splitting up content with too many figures can make reading extremely painful on a short viewport. Design maxims usually lack nuance.
## Spacing
The previous "small viewports" section may tempt you to make your content as dense as possible. Please don't overdo it.
There's an ideal range somewhere between "cramped" and "spaced-apart" content. Finding this range is difficult. The best way to resolve such difficult and subjective issues is to ask your readers for feedback, giving disproportionate weight to readers with under-represented needs (especially disabled readers).
For now, I've decided to keep the indents on list elements (<ol>, <dl>, <ul>) since I often fill them with links. See see this article's table of contents on its Web mirror for an example:
This indentation provides important non-interactive negative space. Readers with hand tremors depend on this space to scroll without accidentally selecting an interactive element:
Readers who double-tap to jump or zoom can't do so if there's no screen region that's "safe to tap":
=> gemini://seirdy.one/misc/touch_targets.png Phone screen with three "touch target" rectangles on top of each other, separated by blank sections labeled "space". Image from Axess Lab.
Having clearly distinguished links also helps users decide safe places to tap the screen. See the "In defense of link underlines" section for more information.
Tap targets should be at least 44 pixels tall and wide according to the WCAG; this is large enough to easily tap on a touch­screen. The WCAG makes an exception for inline targets, like links in a paragraph.
Google has far more aggressive recommendations: it recommends raising the limit 48 pixels regardless of whether tap targets are inline, going so far as to make tap target size a ranking factor in search.
On lists without visible bullets, I dropped the default indentation. I had to find other ways to ensure adequate tap-target size *and* provide sufficient space for readers with hand-tremors to scroll. Some examples:
=> https://seirdy.one/2020/11/23/website-best-practices.html#webmentions The webmention list below this article separates links with timestamps and some paragraph spacing.
=> https://seirdy.one/#posts The homepage posts list separates links with descriptions.
=> https://seirdy.one/2022/02/02/floss-security.html The list of related articles at the top of one of my posts does the same.
Increasing the line-spacing a bit will make tap targets larger and improve comprehension by readers with cognitive disabilities. A WCAG AAA Success Criterion is to allow 1.5 space units between lines.
The WAI's Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility Task Force recommends changing this level, finding it too important to be relegated to AAA status:
Reading modes leverage article extractors such as Readability.js (integrated into Firefox, Epiphany, Brave, Vivaldi, and others), DOM Distiller (integrated into Chromium), and Trafilatura (powers a variety of tools and services). A host of other proprietary options exist: Diffbot powers services like Instapaper, Mozilla's Pocket has its own secret parsers, and countless "send to e-reader" services have amassed loyal users.
Safari's proprietary fork of Readability has grown quite complex compared to upstream; Edge's Immersive Reader is a mystery to me, with a problematic stylesheet:
=> https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/documentation-on-huerestics-used-during-article-distillation-in/m-p/3266436 Forum post: Documentation on huerestics used during article distillation in Immersive Reader
=> https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/e0d9b299-e3b6-ec11-a81c-000d3a7ce453 Text in figures should not be centered: Immersive Reader feedback portal
I don't recommend catering to each tool's non-standard quirks. Studying their design reveals that they observe open standards, to varying degrees. Readability, DOM Distiller, and Trafilatura understand plain-old, semantic HTML (POSH).
POSH should be enough for most use-cases, but some authors want to go further. For example, they may want a byline or published date to show up in these modes.
Most extractors fetch these values using open standards for structured data. The most well-supported option is microformats (Readability is one of the few that supports the newer microformats2). Some support schema.org vocabularies in Microdata or JSON-LD syntaxes, or Dublin Core vocabularies in RDFa. Most parse <meta> tags from the document <head>, but others don't due to misuse and overly aggressive SEO.
Sorry, that was a lot of jargon for a single paragraph. Unfortunately, describing those terms is out of scope for this post. If you'd like to dive down this rabbit hole, read about the "Semantic Web".
Some reading-mode implementations also support DPUB-ARIA, but I'd caution against using ARIA when POSH is sufficient: "bad ARIA" can be far more harmful to screenreaders than "no ARIA". Only use ARIA to fill in gaps left by POSH.
Again: avoid catering to non-standard implementations' quirks, especially undocumented proprietary ones. Let's not repeat the history of the browser wars:
Remember that some implementations have bugs; consider reporting issues when one arises. More information about standard and non-standard behavior of reading modes is in this article by Daniel Aleksandersen:
=> https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/browser-reading-mode-parsers.html Web Reading Mode: The non-standard rendering mode
Reading modes aren't the only non-browser user agents out there. Plain-text feed readers and link previewers are some other options. I singled out reading modes because of their widespread adoption and value. Decide which other kinds of agents are important to you (if any), and see if they expose a hole in your semantics.
Believe it or not, the entire world doesn't speak your website's languages. Browsers like Chromium, Microsoft Edge, and Safari have integrated machine translation to translate entire pages. Users can also leverage online website translators such as Google Translate or Bing. These "webpage translators" are far more complex than their plain-text predecessors.
Almost every word on your site can be re-written. Prepare for headings to change length, paragraphs to grow and shrink, or hyphenation to disappear. Your site's layout should make sense even when the length of each textual element is changed.
To ensure that pages get machine-translated properly, make proper use of semantic HTML. I highly encourage giving this article a read:
=> https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/html-semantic-improve-machine-translation.html Semantic markup improves the quality of machine-translated texts (ctrl.blog)
Elements to pay close attention to include "<code>", "<samp>", "<var>", "<kbd>", "<abbr>", and "<address>". The semantic information conveyed by these elements supplies important context to translation algorithms.
Only after POSH is insufficient should you attempt to "override" behavior with the "translate" HTML attribute. Setting `translate="no"` or `translate="yes"` should override the behavior of standards-compliant translation engines. If you're unsure whether or not to use a `translate` attribute, search the relevant word or phrase on Keybot to see how human translators approached it.
For example: machine translation will leave "<code>" and "<samp>" blocks as-is. Perhaps you could annotate comments within code with a `translate="yes"` attribute. However, translation engines should leave variables within those comments as-is.
Google's style guide recommends annotating format placeholders in code blocks with the "<var>" element; consider doing so and adding a `translate="yes"` attribute to placeholder values, at your discretion.
=> https://developers.google.com/style/placeholders Format placeholders (Google Style Guide)
Consider the implications of translating between left-to-right (LTR) and right-to-left (RTL) languages. Do a search through your stylesheets for keywords like "left" and "right" to ensure that styles don't depend too heavily on text direction. Once you've cleared the low-hanging fruit, try translating the page to a language like Arabic.
Websites following this page's layout advice shouldn't need much adjustment. Ahmed Shadeed's "RTL Styling 101" is a comprehensive guide to what can go wrong and how to fix issues:
If your site is simple enough, it should automatically handle the vast majority of edge-cases. Different devices and browsers all have their quirks, but they generally have one thing in common: they understand POSH.
In addition to standard testing, I recommend testing with unorthodox setups that are unlikely to be found in the wild. If a website doesn't work well in one of these tests, there's a good chance that it uses an advanced Web feature that can serve as a point of failure in other cases. Simple sites should be able to look good in a variety of situations out of the box.
Your page should easily pass the harshest of tests without any extra effort if its HTML meets basic standards for well-written code (overlooking bad formatting and a lack of comments). Even if you use a complex static site generator, the final HTML should be simple, readable, and semantic.
7. Test keyboard navigability with the tab key and caret navigation. Even without specifying tab indexes, tab selection should follow a logical order if you keep the layout simple.
10. Read the (prettified/indented) HTML source itself and parse it with your brain. See if anything seems illogical or unnecessary. Imagine giving someone a printout of your page's <body> along with a whiteboard. If they have a basic knowledge of HTML tags, would they be able to draw something resembling your website?
13. Download your webpage and test how multiple word processors render and generate PDFs from it.¹¹
14. Combine conversion tools. Combine an HTML-to-EPUB converter and an EPUB-to-PDF converter, or stack multiple article-extraction utilities on top of each other. Be creative and enjoy breaking your site. When something breaks, examine the breakage and see if it's caused by an issue in your markup, or a CSS feature with an equivalent alternative.
15. Build a time machine. Travel decades--or perhaps centuries--into the future. Keep going forward until the WWW is breathing its last breath. Test your site on future browsers. Figuring out how to transfer your files onto their computers might take some time, but you have a time machine so that shouldn't be too hard. When you finish, go back in time to meet Benjamin Franklin:
* How to choose phrasings such that some meaning can be inferred without understanding numbers, for dyscalculic readers. This is more applicable to posts whose main focus is not mathematical or quantitative.
* Ways to improve comprehension by readers who struggle to understand non-literal language (certain manifestations of cognitive disabilities, non-native speakers unfamiliar with idioms, etc.). I might wait until this WAI draft specification matures and its vocabularies gain adoption before going in depth:
* the Tor Browser (separate from "uncommon browsers" because of how "safest" mode is often incompatible with progressive enhancement and graceful degradation)
* Disabling JavaScript (overlaps with the Tor Browser)
* Non-default color palettes
* Aggressive content blocking (e.g. blocking all third-party content, frames, images, and cookies)
* User-selected custom fonts
* Stylesheet removal, alteration, or replacement
* Machine translators
Each of these may be dismissed as a "niche", especially given a profit motive (or worse, a growth imperative). Yet *many niches add up to a large population.* Every person who grows old becomes disabled; every long-distance traveller experiences poor connections.
Moreover, I don't think that the size of a disadvantaged population should always matter. I understand weighing population size if you have to make a trade-off between two conflicting special needs, but I don't think the aesthetic preferences of the majority are more important than supporting a disadvantaged minority.
Before you throw up your hands and decide you can't help everyone, take another skim through this page. Notice how much repetition exists between sections. *Nearly every bullet-point I listed benefits tremendously from plain-old, semantic HTML (POSH)*. If your page is usable with nothing but POSH, you've done half the work already.
The 10 KB Club does the same with a 10kb homepage budget (excluding favicons and webmanifest icons). It also has guidelines for noteworthiness, to avoid low-hanging fruit like mostly-blank pages.
The WebBS calculator compares a page's size with the size of a PNG screenshot of the full page content, encouraging site owners to minimize the ratio of the two:
=> https://www.webbloatscore.com/ Web Bloat Score Calculator
One resource I found useful (that eventually featured this article!) was the “Your page content” section of Bill Dietrich’s comprehensive guide to setting up your personal website:
=> https://www.billdietrich.me/YourPersonalWebSite.html#PageContent Your Personal Website
If you've got some time on your hands, I *highly* recommend reading the WCAG:
=> https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/ Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2
The WCAG 2 standard is technology-neutral, so it doesn't contain Web-specific advice. For that, check the the how-to quick reference. It combines the WCAG with its supplementary list of techniques:
=> https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/quickref How to Meet WCAG (Quick Reference)
=> https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/ Techniques for WCAG 2.2
The WCAG are an excellent starting point for learning about accessibility, but make for a poor stopping point. Much of the content on this page simply isn't covered by the WCAG. One of my favorite resources for learning about what the WCAG *doesn't* cover is Axess Lab:
¹ Many addons function by injecting content into pages; this significantly weakens many aspects of the browser security model (e.g. site and origin isolation) and should be avoided if at all possible. For sensitive content such as public key fingerprints, I recommend setting a blank "sandbox" directive even if it means breaking these addons.
² Some addons will have reduced functionality; for instance, Tridactyl can't create an <iframe> for its command window. I consider this to be worthwhile since the most important functionality is still available, and because authors shouldn't feel compelled to support security weakening. I say this as someone who uses Tridactyl often.
⁴ Decoration is more than cosmetic. The "Color overrides and accessibility" sub-section describes how some decorations, like borders, improve accessibility.
⁶ Iterating through a list of font names to see if each one is available on a user's system is a slow but effective way to determine installed fonts without being granted permission to use the Font Access API. BrowserLeaks has a demo of this approach.
=> https://browserleaks.com/fonts BrowserLeaks font fingerprinting demo. Warning: the page might hog your CPU for a while.
⁷ HPACK and QPACK header compression includes dictionaries containing common headers. If a header matches one of these common values, its effective size can be reduced to a single byte. If a header has an uncommon value, consider minifying it by removing unnecessary whitespace. Remember that if your golden first kilobyte already lists all essential resources, these could be considered premature optimizations. Real bottlenecks lie elsewhere.
⁸ Practical Typography only renders invisible text without JavaScript. You can use a textual browser, screen reader, copy-paste the page contents elsewhere, use a reader-mode implementation, or "view source" to read it without enabling scripts. All of these options will ironically override the carefully-crafted typography of this website about typography.
I find Practical Typography quite useful for printed works, and incorporated a more moderate version of its advice on soft-hyphens into this page. With a few such exceptions, I generally find it to be poor advice for Web content.
⁹ libavif links against libaom, librav1e, and/or libsvtav1 to perform AVIF encoding and decoding. libaom is best for this use-case, particularly since libaom can link against libjxl to use its Butteraugli distortion metric. This lets libaom optimize the perceptual quality of lossy encodes much more accurately.
¹⁰ Consider disabling the JIT for your normal browsing too; doing so removes whole classes of vulnerabilities. In Firefox, toggle javascript.options.ion, javascript.options.baselinejit, javascript.options.native_regexp, javascript.options.asmjs, and javascript.options.wasm in about:config; in Chromium, run chromium with `--js-flags='--jitless'`; in the Tor Browser, set the security level to "Safer".
¹¹ Libreoffice can also render HTML but has extremely limited support for CSS. OnlyOffice seems to work best, but doesn't load images. If your page is CSS-optional, it should look fine in both.
Fun fact: Microsoft Outlook renders HTML email with Microsoft Word's proprietary HTML engine.
