blinking text
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Blinking text makes it nearly impossible to pay attention to anything
else on the page. It reduces 87% of all surfers to a helpless state of
fixated brain-lock, much like that of a rabbit caught in the
headlights of an oncoming semi. This is not good. If you abuse the
blink tag, you deserve to be shot. Clue: if you use the blink
tag, you're abusing it.
gratuitous animation
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With animations you get the all the wonderful injuries of the blink
tag with the added insult of the graphics download time. People who
abuse these should have flip books rammed into every bodily orifice
until they figure out that a two- or three-frame graphics loop is
even less pleasant than that.
marquees
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So, maybe you think the blink tag and cheesy animations are the worst
abuse half-bright websmiths can perpetrate on your retinas?
Naaahhhhh. For those times when too much is just not enough, the
Great Satan of Redmond has given us <MARQUEE>, which allows you
to create animated scrolling marquees at the drop of an angle bracket.
This bastard cousin of the blink tag can cause vertigo and seizures in
susceptible individuals, reducing them to exactly that state of
drooling lobotomized idiocy that's such an essential prerequisite to
purchasing Microsoft products. Coincidence? We think not.
garish backgrounds
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The very next time we stumble across a page composed by somebody who
thinks it's cool to use leaping flames or a big moire pattern or seven
shades of hot pink swirly as a background, we swear we are going to
reach right through the screen and rip out that festering puke's
throat. If there's a worse promoter of eyestrain and migraines than
the blink tag, this is it.
unreadable text/background combinations
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The world is full of clowns who think their text pages look better in
clown makeup, clashing colors galore (your typical garish-background
idiot also pulls this one a lot). The magic words these losers need
to learn are "luminance contrast". Your color sense is between you
and the Gods of Bad Taste, but if you don't stick to either light
text on dark backgrounds or the reverse, you will drive away surfers
who like to be able to read without suffering eye-burn.
brushscript headings
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Brushscript headings are rude. Unless, that is, you think every
single surfer hitting your page truly craves the opportunity to
hang out long enough to watch toenails grow while a brushscript
GIF downloads just to display a heading you could have uttered in a
nice, tasteful, fast font.
"Best viewed with..."
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Ah, yes, "Best viewed with..." -- surest sign of an incompetent web
designer. This kind of lameness is not just bad taste, it makes the
site actually unusable for the large numbers of surfers who happen to
be using something other than the designer's favorite browser.
Unfortunately, the sort of people who do "Best viewed with..." is
also usually way too stupid to get the point if you try to explain
that HTML is supposed to be about device-independence -- so pull them by
the guilt-strings and point out that blind people surf too. If that
doesn't work, club them to death with a chair leg or something. No
court would convict.
"resize your browser to..." instructions
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Right. As if we wanted our browsers to take up that big a chunk of
screen real estate. But what's really annoying is that invariably
these bozos get it wrong. Like, their browser has an 8-pixel offset,
ours eats 20, and they forgot to allow for scroll bars so they're off
by at least 30 pixels anyway and the display graphics are complete
garbage.
large fixed-size tables
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This one is often brought to you by the same idiots who so love
"resize your browser to..." instructions. Hello? Hello? Would
somebody explain to me how it escapes these people that the world is
inhabited by lots of people with different sized displays, and
that tables flow for a reason? Sigh...
unnecessary border spacing
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In this particularly moronic variant of large fixed-size tables, the
designer puts the entire web page in a table and pads the
edges with empty columns of a fixed width. Duh. This is a sure sign
that he or she is one of those pathetic desktop-publishing weenies
who thinks HTML is a page description language. Hanging's too
good for them...
Pointless use of <small> or <font size=>
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If we wanted our text to be unreadably tiny, we'd have told our
browser to display it that way. This one mugs viewers with 20"
and 21" screens particularly hard; since most fonts are scaled
for 72dpi they're already 30% smaller than they ought to be at 100dpi.
Anybody who use these tags for running text should be compressed by
30% themselves, slowly.
masturbation with Javascript
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There is a large class of Javascript annoyances perpetrated by people
whose ability to do cutting and pasting exceeds their negligible sense
of taste. Of these, one of the most common is the script that scrolls
text in the Netscape status line. To all the disadvantages of
<MARQUEE> this one adds the fact that you can't see where links
go any more. Better than that, pages with 25K of Javascript followed
by < 5K of actual content; these pages, of course, are invariably
hosted on slow servers so you can experience the pleasure of waiting
for Javascript to load just so you can see a cutesy animated menu bar
or something equivalently useless. In general, any page whose source
has more Javascript than content should be sent to the recycle bin.
unnecessary use of Java
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There is one thing worse than your average garden-variety idiot web
designer, and that is the half-clever idiot who loves to ring in all
the latest technology without stopping to think about its
side-effects. One notorious Fortune 100 website, when it detects a
Netscape browser, assumes you must be able to support a fancy Java
search applet -- and if you have Java turned off for security reasons,
you can't search the site, because the perfectly adequate CGI search
you'd get if you were using Lynx has been disabled. Moral: Keep It
Simple, Stupid!
pop-up windows
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Some particularly irritating designers have discovered the magic
formula that causes your browser to spawn a new window when you
click on a link -- or worse, ways to make pop-up windows appear
even if all all you're trying to do is exit their wretched hive of
scum and villainy as rapidly as you can find the Back button.
Stay in your own window, dammit! The Web is supposed to be
about viewer control; designers who persist in rudely
grabbing pieces of the viewer's screenspace without permission
deserve to be lashed with knouts.
menus made entirely from image maps
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Clue: lots of people use text-only browsers like lynx, either because
they want to (for speed) or because they have to (visual impairment,
or lack of a graphics display). An entire page that shows up only as
"[ISMAP]-[IMAGE]" is useless. Designers who can't be bothered to at
least provide a link to an alternate text menu are, at the very least,
guilty of laziness and thoughtlessness. Huge image-maps are bad even
for graphical browsers; they're slow-loading and needlessly frustrate
users. And a frustrated user is a gone user.
background MIDI, Flash, Shockwave, and other abominations
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Background music takes forever to load, and isn't portable. Flash and
Shockwave take forever to load, aren't portable, and are proprietary
formats that lock you into a single vendor. When you insult your
viewers with crap like this, don't expect them back.