> This sounds regressive and the battle has been over for almost a decade now
This sounds like what google would like for everyone on HN to believe.
Using "a11y" and "SEO" to push bad technology abstractions is tantamount to petty bullying in my view.
Genuinely, I don't understand the position that SSR somehow makes accessibility worse. Can you walk me through how adding more javascript on top somehow solves the problem of making a website compatible with a screen reader?
> Can you walk me through how adding more javascript on top somehow solves the problem of making a website compatible with a screen reader?
I didn't say to add javascript to make the page more accessible. I said that a static HTML page is most accessible and should be strongly preferred over any dynamic content regardless of how it's rendered. Screen readers can misannounce dynamic elements and leave the user confused about the state of the page.
But when dynamic elements do need to be reannounced due to an event, refreshing the page would be a terrible experience since the screen reader loses focus and starts back from the top of the page. Aria alerts also require javascript. It makes perfect sense that if you're pushing out an aria alert with js already that all that rendering logic should also go on the client side.
As for SEO, I'm specifically talking about good metadata in the head tag, a static page that's comprehensible, and a sitemap. Static pages are better than SSR for this because SSR doesn't always respond with the same page for the same URL.
This sounds like what google would like for everyone on HN to believe.
Using "a11y" and "SEO" to push bad technology abstractions is tantamount to petty bullying in my view.
Genuinely, I don't understand the position that SSR somehow makes accessibility worse. Can you walk me through how adding more javascript on top somehow solves the problem of making a website compatible with a screen reader?