February 22, 1995

So

But that's not what this page is about. This is about all the annoying things that have been done on web pages. Some are my personal pet peeves, some are just newbies mistakes, some are just plain blindness and stupidity. Some of these mistakes I have made myself, so I am not completely innocent.

My number one complaint is about FAT web pages. You know, the ones that take twenty minutes to load at 28.8K, because they are usually all image-maps, and you have to point and click on the pretty graphics to get anything done. They are usually all cyber-flash, written by people who are so used to using a T1 for web access that they forget what the consumer uses. Maybe some of them do know how sluggish the page is, but want to show their boss/client how pretty it is, hoping their boss/client never tries to load it from home. Luckily, The Bandwidth Conservation Society is making headway in fighting the graphics glut.

It seems the more graphics there are in a page, the less actually useful information it contains. USELESS web pages are somewhat expected if its just joe-aol's personal home page. But if its mega-tech-comp, inc.'s page where you would expect to find up-to-date technical information about a product, especially one related to the computer industry, and all you find is a bunch of scanned-in sales brochures on a clickable map, and then find out that they are three months out-of-date, there is little excuse. There may have been at one time, when in a rush to get on the web companies did a two hour hack job of a web page, but now people have the right to expect more.

CYBER-INFO-HIGHWAY-WEBSPINNER-NETISM. I read and enjoyed William Gibson's Neuromancer and his other books, but the stuff is getting a little bit tired. Its so, uh, 1992. And this information-super-highway thing posed by Al Gore was lame to begin with, and doesn't need to be furthered. Especially since the government has done absolutely nothing to help the Internet, only hurt it. The spider-web thing was only a tenuous analogy at best, and is now better left out. "Oh what tangled webs we weave, when we venture to deceive" is all I can think of when somebody other than a spider mentions "spinning web pages".

LINKISM is when a web page is nothing but a link to other web pages, a "Cool Sites" list. This is actually not always a bad thing. If you hunt high and low for web pages on a particular topic, and do a better job at presentation than yahoo, then it is a good thing. Otherwise it is a bad thing. I have done this in the past, and to a certain extent still have "lists of links" - but at least TRY to keep them up to date, and maybe comment a LITTLE BIT about what the links go to. And be DISCRIMINATING please! While it may be nice to have an informative page on PGP, there is no reason to have a link to every person who mentions it on their home page. If we wanted that, we could use yahoo or even web crawler.

CONSTRUCTIONISM - It is easy to think of a web page as a static thing that you make once and then that's it. So while you are in the process of making it you want to warn people about possible broken-ness. But the reality is that a GOOD web page is ALWAYS under construction. Its like an intelligent person in that its never a finished work, just more refined. So take down the damned signs! I had those up for a while, before I realized exactly how volatile and evolving the Internet is. I hate those take-offs on highway signs. Maybe I'll put up "slippery when wet" on some page somewhere just to confuse people a little bit.

A STATIC PAGE is a bad thing, see above. Some things are going to stay the same, but most informative things will have addendum. And what of the decorative issues? I get bored looking at the same old graphics all the time. Some companies seem to remodel their offices more often than their web pages. It is important that pages are FRESH. If I depend on a certain web page to be technically current, yet it has the same old graphics for a year or more, how much can I trust the currency of its information? YAHOO has realized this for a long time. NETSCAPE has finally changed their graphics.

NETSCAPISM is the tendency to design your web page as though everyone was using exactly the same version of Netscape as you. I hate to tell you this folks, but Netscape is not the only browser out there. And its not even consistent among its versions. I understand wanting to look current and all, but it would be nice if people still wrote HTML and not NETSCAPE-ML. MIT has taken a stand on this and to some extent I agree with them. Depending on how you look at it, Netscape is either trying to be very creative, or they are trying to set the standard themselves as the market leader, leaving everyone else in a position of catch-up. We don't have to fall for this, it is bad to make one company too powerful. What are you going to do when they stop handing out evaluation copies of their browser and start charging whatever they want for it? They want to own the web it seems. While certainly not as arrogant as Microsoft, they may have similar aims. I'd love it if someone wrote a web-server that would detect what browser you were using and hand you html optimized for and compatible with that browser. Maybe I'll write it myself, one of these days.

CUT-N-PASTE Graphics - Do you really thing I am impressed with the FAT (see above) logo that you obviously hacked out of photoshop in five minutes? Or the same clip-art that I saw on a page that you have a link to, the one that you liked so much you had to steal their graphics? Christ, if you're going to be quick-and-dirty about it, stick to text. Its faster and less garish.

OUT-OF-DATE links - This is a problem that vexes every html author. Its a continuous problem. I try to fix them, at least when I find out they are broken. There used to be a service for html-checking that I relied on, but I found that it didn't find most errors. If you're going to do something, do it right!

users NON-DESCRIPT or ABUSIVE complaints - I welcome email reporting problems with my work. But if I get one more "I couldn't download a file...what happened?" I am going to ascii-bomb the sender unless they specify WHICH link was broken and WHAT error it reported! After I tell you its fixed, or whenever you try to access it again, hit RELOAD in case the bad version is still in your cache. If I have a link to an FTP server or something else that may get full, please take a look at what you are trying to connect to and only send a bug report in if its appropriate. I also hate complaint for stuff that is NOT ON MY SITE. just because I have a link to it doesn't make me responsible for it! Another thing: a number of new users must think that their ISP pays me a percentage of their monthly fee, I constantly get complaints that are abusive or in a snotty tone of voice. Don't they realize that most of this stuff I am not paid for in any way? or that When I am paid for it, it is by someone who is NOT CHARGING the USER? ARGG.

HIT-COUNTERS - These are the fuzzy-dice of the Internet. Once cool and almost useful, they are ultimately pointless and utterly annoying. Do I really care how many hits your site has got? If I care, do I believe you? These things are terribly easy to forge. People use them to make their sites look popular and feed their ego. And the bloody odometer has got to go. There is a great potential for humor in FAKE hit-counters.

3/8/95 - an additional gripe - people who make HUGE (huge to me is over 25K) documents with anchors, when it could better be several different files. What it means is that I spend 10 minutes downloading some telecom page in finland when I just want a very specific section of it that I have a link to, a link that's an anchor. What's the matter, are thsese guys afraid of losing a few i-nodes? Come on!

2/1/98 - Wow, it's been almost three years since I have added to this page. Lots has changed, but web pages are as bad as ever. I am happy that the "this page under contruction" signs have dissappeared. There is a larger number of people who share my views on the web bloat, but I fear that they are a smaller percentage of the web-using population than in 1995. Everything else has gone downhill - we are still seeing un-neccessarily graphics-intensive sites such as http://www.surplusdirect.com sucking up a lot of bandwidth. Even though I now have a T1 here at sinister, many pages are still too damned slow. It would seem as though most pages out there only load fast on a cable modem. Oh well. One of the things that can be done is to optimize the graphics you use. This can be relatively painless for a small gain, or if you put some effort into it the saved bandwidth can be considerable. For *nix users, there's a package called jpegoptim. Here's the Linux binary and the Source. There are similar programs for Windows 95. In loss-less compression mode, I have seen up to 60% compression. The average is around 10%.

That's all my spouting for now. I hope you found it enjoyable/educational/maddening. I am sure I will have more complaints to add later. Or send me some material. But be nice.