If EWW works on your website it's well designed

TL;DR If one can use EWW to interact and use your website, that website has been designed well. Note I’m not say a well designed must work on Eww, that would be silly for stuff like JavaScript based SPAs

The Emacs Web Wowser (EWW) is a text based web browser in Emacs. It’s ridiculously simple and doesn’t have a lot of features: it can’t even evaluate JavaScript (NOOOOO!, I hear the frontend dev cry). It’s pretty damn fast, unsurprisingly. It responds quickly and does an admirable job at rendering and styling.

As it can’t run JavaScript it implicitly blocks ads: how can you show me a link to some ad farming website (the latest gossip about <insert random celebrity>!!) when I can’t even evaluate the code to fetch it?

Well that’s great and all Aryadev but what was that clickbait title about?

It’s about accessibility, my impatient reader. When I use EWW on a website and it’s not an immediate horror fest (the text is laid out well, colours aren’t horrific, images are placed correctly) it shows me that the designer has put effort into the experience of users who aren’t just using Firefox or some flavour of Chromium. It implies that the HTML is a structural document for the website; EWW doesn’t work well with websites that use the HTML as a dumping ground with CSS and JavaScript bandages.

This has real consequences for people who are interacting with the internet in non-classical ways. Consider screen readers, important applications for those who may have bad eyesight or just would rather use one. Many websites are horrifyingly bad for screen readers, with ads and arbitrary HTML elements screaming for attention, the actual information of the page being nested away around 50 div’s in.

Anyone should be able to use the internet1. By designing websites for only the most common use cases, we necessarily deny (or vastly increase the barrier for entry) for some of the population. Funnily, it’s not difficult in many cases to design such interfaces while still having your blazing fast dynamic interface. DuckDuckGo and Google both provide plain-text versions of their interfaces (usually through HTTP instead of HTTPs) while still having their heavier counterparts for browsers that can handle it.

  1. It’s a sin, in my opinion, to deny people access to the internet. Never has humanity ever had access to this amount of information at such speeds and it’s a great shame that some cannot use it for reasons outside of their control. ↩︎