Forum Moderators: open
What is your pet html/code peeve when visit a site. Mine would be:
- non underlined links.
- micro fonts
- pastel or light grey fonts (some hard to read color combo).
These are ads run by large companies like Oracle too, so they really have no excuse.
Oh, and a bit of a personal one this probably, but doing some nice work for a company, then them getting some fumblehanded idiot redesign it later, and them making such a hash of it that you have to take it off your CV.
oh yeah - animated company logos on every page. I'm not a big fan of animation anyway, but I accept that it can be useful if you want to draw a visitors eye to something like a specials page on a site. But an animated company logo on every page? All the time you're trying to read the content, you have this annoying little flashing rotating thingy trying to draw your eye away and forcing you to read each line 3 or 4 times
FLASH Intros - especially if there is no way to bypass/skip it
FLASH sites without alternative HTML only versions
Autoloading music/sounds
Not being able to use Back button
Poor navigation
Auto popups/popunders
Jas0n
*** Pop ups I didn't ask to see ... such as those which AOL insists on forcing down your throat. Pop ups have their place (provided) the user gets to make the choice.
*** Sites which disable my back button. What is that all about??? If you go in a store, do they lock the door behind you so you can't leave until you buy something?
*** Sites in which you get lost in a maze and can't find your way back to something you were interested in without starting over and trying to remember how you got there in the first place.
*** Sites which require you to fill out long, detailed forms in order to get information ... and then an error message comes back, your form info has been lost and there is no e:mail address to report the error ... ARGGH!
** Long download times. No need for this and its just annoying.
** Graphics that bop all over the place.
* Flash intro pages. What's the point?
* Sites which don't publish their prices and require you to contact them. I wouldn't buy anything in a store which doesn't allow me to see the price and I don't want a sales representative to hover over me while I shop either.
Of any sort. Stop it. There is truely no need for intros, IMHO. I would give a thousand dollars to find statistics that would show me proof that everybody skips these annoying time wasters. I have seen several sites offer to show you their intro page via a link through their index page, now that's a good idea.
- Flash -
Ugh. It's not that flash isn't pretty, just ease off a little on the fading text and animated curtains that close every time I press a button. Once again, I have seen examples of Flash and HTML being used in beautiful harmony. Anything that delays the delivery of content is a waste. Unless your an artsy person with lots of time on your hands.
- Pop Ups/Unders/Overs -
If anything makes me want to slam my head against the monitor, it's this. Nothing should "pop", except my cereal in the morning. I accidently clicked onto a site that had so many pop-ups, my computer broke. I don't have enough screen space for your adverts of Hidden Cameras. Oh, and anyone who actually clicks on the "You have one new message" pop-up ads should have their computers taken away from them.
- Lack of White Space -
Give my eyes a break. If you have a million pages of content, spread it out over several HTML pages. If it looks like I have too much to read on one page, guess what? I won't.
- Quick Time Music/Video -
I don't want to download stuff from a website that I will never use anywhere else, much less download "Quick Time Music Streamer", so I can hear your MIDI version of Hotel California. Enough said.
- Full Screen Interfaces -
If you can't display your information "within" my browser, what makes you think that a full screen on-slaught at 1024x800 is going to work? I hate this with a passion and usually ALT-F4 before it finishes loading.
- Confusing Roll Overs -
I also don't click anything that doesn't tell me where I'll end up. Simplicity still rules.
- Small Text -
I'm old, and I can't see all that well. My eye doctor tells me it's natural for your sight to start failing you, as you grow older. I believe it is because text is getting smaller and smaller on the Internet. Who can read a 3 point font anyway?
..Man I could go on for days..but, I digress.
SlyGuy
Colour blindness does not result in black-and-white vision. The most common form of colour blindess is red-green, which means that both red and green look the same -- probably a sort of brownish-orangey yuck.
Not really. Most of us have pretty normla color vision except in a narrow range where receptivity is simply low. So a green traffic light tends to look a lot like a white light to me because the b/w receptors pick it up as light, but the color receptors aren't there to give it hue.
Tom
SlyGuy: "- Lack of White Space -Give my eyes a break. If you have a million pages of content, spread it out over several HTML pages. If it looks like I have too much to read on one page, guess what? I won't.
The W3C documents spring to mind.
As for long downloads, I recently came across two links on a forum to pages with photographs on them. One was the full-size images, one after another, no thumbnails! The other was thumbnails the size of small images, and in both cases, hundreds of images on ONE page.
The first page I hit the stop button after half an hour - it still hadn't loaded on my 56K modem!
The second page I left running while I worked on my website, and it must have taken over an hour to download.
I hate pages that just go on forever - have people never heard of hypertext links to the next page?
So a green traffic light tends to look a lot like a white light to me
(Okay, so this is off-topic. But I guess this illustrates the problem of trying to get non-colourblind people to appreciate the problems faced by colourblind people.)
