Web developers never visit their own sites or surf the Web at all. If they did, we would not have so many pure suck Web sites. Readability, navigability, and persistent searchable archives are apparently Crimes Against L33t Web Development. Why do site owners spend zillions of dollars for poo?
This page illustrates a fun new trend:
Pingtel News and Event
Pale fonts! A whole page of them. Fun! Perfect for people who don’t want to bother with reading the page.
Toyota.com is more of a commercial for Macromedia Flash than its own products. They don’t want visitors with slow Internet connections or non-Microsoft operating systems to visit their site. I don’t want a television experience on the Web, because it sucks rocks. Crappy video, crappy sound, and painfully slow. Expensive junk that no one looks at. What’s the point?
ftp1.digium.com/pub/asterisk is an example of a common mistake on Web indexes: truncated filenames. How the heck are you supposed to know what they are? It is very easy to display long filenames in a HTTP index, as this little howto shows. Just two little config lines fixes it.
Final rant: Web documents in .pdf only, or worse, .doc format, and no HTML page option. There are meeeelyuns of conversion utilities. Shame, shame, everybody knows your name.
I could go on and on, but what fun would that be? Tell me your fave Web horror stories.
I'd like to nominate this page for being squished all the way over to the left of the screen, and then only using about 50% of the horizontal space.
I don't mind the 50%, but there should be some padding on the left, perhaps moving one of the two columns on the right to teh left.
That white space is for taking notes.
Dang, I slay me.
But wouldn't it be cool if you could use that space like a whiteboard?
It would be cool if it had wheels like a whiteboard and could be moved over to the left hand side.
Massive amounts of wasted space vs itty bitty text space.
Then again, "Web developers never visit their own sites".
Actually, most of the time web developers argue against this stuff for hours on end, but ultimately web designers make the decisions. Web developers have to call it a win when you don't get a huge flash movie.
Andrew, I stand corrected. I forget how many different people get involved in making these sorts of decisions. Now I have this mental image of designers in turtlenecks and granny glasses and cigarettes in holders squealing "oh, that's exquisite!" at all the wrong things.
The ORA sites in general (including this page) seem to have their primary font reduced from my chosen size. Who felt it necessary to reduce my font to 75%? Why? Sure, fiddle with secondary text, headers, menus, etc.--but let my primary font alone!
Yes, I can disallow sites from changing fonts or font sizes, but then layouts tend to get really messed up and it's a one-size fits all option; currently, the lesser evil is increase the font size when it's necessary. But it shouldn't really be necessary!
ah so it's not just me then?
having problems with all that white space off to the right there, glaring away at me, balnk, empty, screaming white space, empty .... white space ... the
blank horror of empty white space ... off to the right, there, over there, just
glaring at us ... balnk ... empty ... white .... space ... runs screaming to
the empty white room.
You know, I don't mind the whitespace so much; while I'd like maybe a little more margin on the left, I also appreciate the fact that the lines of text do not extend all the way across my screen, which makes following line-breaks to the next line difficult.
Perhaps we could consider the empty right-hand column as a meditative space; a place of calm; a chance to rest and restore our balance and feelings of wholeness.
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So far, so good...
didn't work for me....
I could not agree more with you.
But regarding the PDF/DOC/ODT issue: Just enter the URL in a Google search box and they will probably be able to spit out a HTML version of those document formats. No pictures though.