Just on the contrary, critical applications such as government services or banking could provide a light version that just works, maybe a simple HTML/CSS frontend without heavy frameworks to ensure that the service is deliverable.
Once I faced an issue with the SBB ticket system (Swiss rail tickets) that was not working on my iPhone (maybe 8), not in Safari on macOS, and I needed to buy a ticket on the train as in this particular place there was no offline ticket service.
Such services indeed must have a minimal requirements version.
Tell that to the developers that are 5 years, 1 million lines and 500 TODOs deep into their legacy React banking frontend. Adding stuff on top of your existing hacks is easy, taking unnecessary code away is hard. Especially if all your training on web accessibility was a one-day workshop where you never actually learned how to do anything, only why you need to do it.
Source: I used a frontend developer working on a big bank frontend. The existing UI stack was horrendous and deadlines and bank politics wouldn’t allow you to refactor anything. Just build shit on top and hope that Jenga tower of a web application doesn’t fall apart halfway there.
Thank you so much for sharing this! This is absolutely exactly how it feels.
I believe the most important point here is the internal business politics that allows such an approach in development. Once I was curious and tried to find out how private banks' front ends look, and I was surprised to learn that they used minimal frameworks (sometimes none) and obviously zero external resources.
One thing is clear: if the business structure allows 10MB for a login page, this is not only about the front-end, this could be about all services and could spread much wider.
BTW, the bank that we use (with the 10MB login page) totally sucks in every aspect of business relations as well.
This is unhinged FUD. I have some websites, that needs to adhere to the new rules. It was fairly easy to do. One of them is a react app with mantine components. I was done in less than a day and have not changed the asset size at all.
