I am entirely inclined to agree with you. It is definitely perpetuated by project stakeholders, even developers wanting to try new tech.
But now that we have spent years training eCommerce user behaviours you do find that people will be busy clicking everything but the product title, arguably the most semantic place to put the anchor, so it may take a user a few goes to get where they're going. The user might not care but many of the project stakeholders do.
While I am an evangelist of a utilitarian, semantic web, I feel it's an idealism that hasn't survived it's encounter with the real world in commercial software. We went from being worried about javascript image sliders being too heavy, to making the client compute and render the entire application, in about 8 years. I think the trajectory is clear, and I doubt we'll have a watershed moment where the whole tree of stakeholders suddenly wants less.
If this particular thing of clicking everything but the title is really a thing, nothing is blocking you to add some minimal JavaScript which « onclick » on the item div element, triggers a click on the link. Add some « cursor: pointer » in you Stylesheet and you are done.
It’s literally 2 loc, it doesn’t affect accessibility and it’s using JavaScript for what it was meant : adding some optional convenience.
I realize I’ve not done real server rendered sites for years, but adding good old « optional convenience » JS without jQuery and broken browsers, but with ES6, modules, and maybe WebComponents would probably be a really pleasant experience.
Yes you are right, that's a good approach. Another commenter linked a great article on accessibility and "card" style content which also recommended that approach, worth a read as it discusses a lot of the caveats and your approach tackles the majority of the issues you can encounter.
But now that we have spent years training eCommerce user behaviours you do find that people will be busy clicking everything but the product title, arguably the most semantic place to put the anchor, so it may take a user a few goes to get where they're going. The user might not care but many of the project stakeholders do.
While I am an evangelist of a utilitarian, semantic web, I feel it's an idealism that hasn't survived it's encounter with the real world in commercial software. We went from being worried about javascript image sliders being too heavy, to making the client compute and render the entire application, in about 8 years. I think the trajectory is clear, and I doubt we'll have a watershed moment where the whole tree of stakeholders suddenly wants less.