No government service should require a frontend.

API only access where a frontend is currently available should be a legal requirement. For one thing, not doing so is prejudicial regarding accessibility.

I really yearn for a world where we stop making people deal with all these garbage frontends. Especially in the coming age of personal LLMs on device - anyone should be able to create their own frontend for any service and drive their own version specifically tuned to them. Make the standard frontend as simple and accessible as possible (minimal scripting - I think you could have a government agency set this as a regulatory limit in terms of KB of JavaScript) and just cut the fat and the abhorrent waste.

Clients will ship with defaults. Most people's personal tunes will not deviate much from each other at all. But people who actually care can make it as interesting as they want. Instead what we have now is a system that incentivizes people to make the default too interesting to justify their own employment. It's rare to come across a frontend these days that doesn't scream absolute garbage.

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mindslight 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'd like to see this across the board as part of effective anti trust enforcement. Big tech is flagrantly tying the use of their proprietary client apps (whether delivered over JS or an app store) with whatever actual backend services they offer. These need to be declared two separate markets/products, and broken up.

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pipe2devnull 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Amtrak isn’t a government service though

	▲	godwinson__4-8 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes fair enough but it's close enough. Ideally, this requirement would apply to all services with a public frontend, not merely to government services or whatever the proper term for the middle ground Amtrak occupies is. But yes you are correct, this occurred to me earlier that someone might point this out. From my perspective these classifications are increasingly dubious anyway, given the glut of corporate welfare and the increasing confluence of the public and private. More of the economy should be more accurately seen as a public/private partnership across the board. I'm not sure picking out where exactly Amtrak falls in that minutia is the salient point. The point is the government should use its higher leverage over Amtrak to enforce/test such a policy, on the theory its success and wider adoption would be a public benefit.