Hell html

“Hell is other web programmers.” - Jean-Paul Sartre, supplemented with a quote.

Know that you are in the Underworld of design, if you see ...

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flashing text

Because of the flashing text, it is almost impossible to pay attention to anything else besides him. It leads 87% of users to a helpless state of a stupor, much like how a rabbit becomes numb in the light of oncoming headlights. This is bad. If you incorrectly use the blink tag, you should be shot. Tip: if you use the blink tag, you use it incorrectly ( there is a suitable comment on this topic on User Friendly).

unwarranted animation

Animation will cause you all the same wonderful injuries as the blink tag, and in the appendix will insult the time of loading graphics. Those who abuse graphics should shove books into each hole of the body until they realize that two-, three-frame animation is even less pleasant than their condition.

ticker

Maybe you think that the blink tag and lousy animation are the worst tortures that twilight web programming geniuses can expose your eyes to? Nooooo. In case this is not enough, the Great Satan of Redmond presented us with a tag that allows you to create animated running lines with one throw of the angle bracket. This bastard brother of the blink tag can cause dizziness and seizures in susceptible people, making them look like victims of a lobotomy drooling - which, in fact, need to be to buy Microsoft products. Coincidence? We do not think so.

colorful background

As soon as we stumble upon a page whose author believes that it is cool to use flames, a moire pattern or bright pink curls as a background, we swear that right now we’ll reach this pimply scoundrel and tear his throat right through the screen. If there is such a source of migraines and pain in the eyes that will be worse than the blink tag, then this is a motley background.

unreadable text-background combinations

This world is full of clowns, who believe that their text pages look better with clown makeup from eye-cutting color combinations (the typical amateur idiot of the colorful background also drags a whole bunch of it all). These losers need to learn two magic words: "light contrast." Let your sense of color remain between you and the God of Evil Taste, but if you can not stand the light text on a dark background, or vice versa, you ward off visitors who love to read without suffering from cramps in their eyes.

handwritten headings

Handwritten headlines are rude. Unless you think that every user who gets on your page really asks for the opportunity to hang on it for a long time, watching the growth of nails, while the image is loaded, just showing the title, which you could type in a sweet, pleasant and, most importantly, "Fast" font.

"It looks best in ..."

Oh, yes, “best of all looks in ...” is a sure sign of designer incompetence (if this is not one of the parodic campaign buttons of the “ Viewable with Any Browser ” - “You can look in any browser”). This form of inferiority is not just a bad taste, it makes the site practically unsuitable for a huge number of visitors who have had the opportunity to use something other than the designer’s favorite browser. Unfortunately, the people who indicate “It looks best in ...” are also too stupid to understand what you are talking about when you try to explain to them that HTML is supposed to be platform-independent. So it’s worth carving them out and explaining that blind people also use the Internet. If this does not work, hammer them to death with a chair leg, or something else. No court will find you guilty.

"Resize your browser window to ..."

Right. As if we wanted our browsers to take up so much screen space. But it really infuriates that these subjects invariably do everything wrong. For example, their browser is indented by 8 pixels, ours eat up 20, and they forgot to provide scrollbars, so in any case they were mistaken by at least 30 pixels, and the displayed graphics are real slop.

huge tables of fixed size

We often encounter them thanks to the same idiots who love the instructions "resize the browser window to ...". Hey? Is there anyone? Is there anyone here who will explain to me why it does not come to them that the world is inhabited by many people with different monitors, and that floating tables are not in vain invented? Oh…

unnecessary spacing between borders

This is a particularly moronic kind of large fixed tables: the designer places the whole page in a table and completes the edges with empty columns of fixed width. NDA A sure sign that he or she is one of those pathetic desktop publishing experts who think that HTML is a page description language. The gallows is too good for them.

Aimless use

  <small> and <font size => 

If we needed an unreadable-small text, we would have said so to our browser. These tags especially rob users with 20-inch and 21-inch monitors: since most fonts are designed for 72dpi, at 100dpi they are already 30% smaller than they should be. Everyone who uses these tags in the text should be compressed by 30% by itself, slowly and, preferably, in a machine with huge terrible spikes.

masturbation with javascript

Javascript is associated with a wide range of problems produced by people whose ability to copy and paste exceeds their negligible sense of taste. One of the most common inconveniences is a script that scrolls text in the status bar of Netscape. To all the flaws, he adds the fact that you no longer see where the links lead. Even better, pages with 25 kilobytes of Javascript contain less than 5 kilobytes of content; these pages, of course, are invariably placed on slow servers, so you can experience the pleasure of waiting for Javascript downloads, because only this way you can see the original animated menu or something just as useless. In general, every page that contains more Javascript than content should be sent to the trash.

Java abuse

There is something worse than an ordinary idiot web designer, and this is a half-smart idiot who loves to implement all the latest technologies in a row without thinking about their side effects. One well-known Fortune 100 website, determining that you are using Netscape, believes that your browser should support a trendy search Java applet. And if you have disabled Java for security reasons, you cannot search the site, because a completely adequate CGI search that you could use in Lynx has been disabled. Moral: Do not complicate, stupid! (KISS principle approx. Lane.)

popup windows

Some particularly intolerable designers have discovered a magic formula that forces your browser to open a new window when you click on a link - or even worse, pops up windows when you just try to escape from their abject abode of filth and violence as quickly as you can. find the back button. Stay in your own window, damn it! The Internet should not be out of the user's control; Designers stubbornly grabbing a piece of a custom screen without permission deserve a good whipping.

menus built entirely with image map

Hint: many people use text browsers (for example, Lynx), because they want it (for download speed), or because they are forced (visual disturbance or lack of a graphic display). And therefore the whole page displayed as “[ISMAP] - [IMAGE]” is useless. Designers who did not bother to at least add a link to an alternative text menu are at least lazy and imprudent. Huge image maps are bad even for graphical browsers; they take a long time to load and frustrate users in vain. A dissatisfied user is a lost user.

launch video and audio without confirmation

What about video clips that suddenly start playing by default without asking if you want to include them? No, we do not want. If there are banners on your site - great, but if my speakers suddenly start yelling about how I can win a GIFT CARD FOR THOUSAND DOLLARS, if I WILL DO A POLL NOW, then I guarantee you that I will rather lick ulcers in leprous space, than pass your survey or ever deal with you. And another tip for anyone who makes porn sites: most people watching porn do not want the sounds of having sex to be heard by everyone within a radius of 30 feet.

styles (CSS) that set a fixed font size in pixels

This is a favorite way for web designer idiots to make a site unreadable on monitors with smaller dot spacing than the ones used by them. Guess what happens if you install a 10-pixel or 11-pixel font on a 72dpi monitor, and then watch it on a 120dpi monitor? That's right, instant eye strain, and another user curses your name. This problem over time will be even worse, as the monitors are becoming larger and more fine-grained.

CSS that changes hot colors

Isn't it fun when you look at the page and your eyes stop trying to see which part of the text is hot links? Underlined blue and purple are valuable navigation tips in the jungle of the Web. If the page contains multi-colored links or links that are difficult to distinguish, then this is another case where the cancellation of browser settings must be punished by familiarity with the cutting knife.

Change the colors of text or background individually, rather than together

Suppose I like it when the browser displays pages with green text on a black background by default. (Yes, I actually received a letter from a reader who does this!) If you make the text color black, but do not change the background color, the site becomes unreadable in my browser. And if you make the background color white (or, even worse, orange - this also happened!), But do not change the color of the text, then my eyestrain will develop, and I will wish you an invasion of creeping horrors. It is not too clever to assume that the user was not playing with the settings of his browser; Install either both colors at once, or none.

MIDI, Flash, Shockwave, and other abominations in the background

Background music is loaded for ages, and it is not portable. Flash and Shockwave are loaded indefinitely, are not portable, and because of the proprietary nature of their formats, you become dependent on a single software vendor. When you mix your visitors with similar crap, you shouldn't expect them to come back to you.

Know you content Hell if you see ...

visitor counters

“You are the 2317th visitor to this page.” Yeah, as if we care. On Yahoo or Alta Vista, you can effortlessly find and view every page on the ground, where, for example, tables or dirt between your fingers are mentioned. In this wondrous new world, the counters of visits are nothing more than a particularly moronic form of membery, which makes an impression only on hamsters. Counters can tell you how many people have come across and visited this bright, sparkling page, but they are not able to even hint how many of them grumbled “sucks!” And got out of here faster than you can say “mouse click”. The additional damage from link counters is that they break page caching, increasing the load on the Internet.

guest books

If we have something to tell you, we will send a letter. To start a guest book is nonsense, it only shows that the designer does not think about what happens when you trick people into writing something, or at least something. Of course, at least 95% of the contents of such a guest book will be a meaningless nonsense.

outdated links

Outdated links suck. Those with a lot of outdated links are lamers. Okay, everybody points to them from time to time - but you didn't notice that outdated links tend to appear on the page en masse, like cockroaches? The fact is that the owners of good websites monitor their pages, thoroughly understand them and quickly fix broken links; so it’s unlikely that they have many outdated links at once. A page with a bunch of outdated links screams: "My author is a lazy and backward loser with the pose of a klopovnik owner who owns a palace of cockroach."

pages forever "in development"

Netizens quickly understand that out of 10 signs “under construction” only two will be able to take off before the second coming of Christ. This is stupid. HTML is not rocket science, and making the page layout is not that long. Anyone who cannot find the time to remove the “under construction” signboard from their pages should stick these pages away and find a lesson more suited to his abilities: for example, drooling or staring at the wall.

Know that you are in the Underworld style if you see ...

meaningless vanity pages

If we were given 5 kopecks for each homepage we saw with dreary variations on the topic “Hi, it's me, and here are cool photos of my dogs / cats / friend / girlfriend”, then we could go to Maldives in the company of super- models. Tip: if you have nothing to say, shut up. And save it from the Web - life is too short for boredom.

melancholy and pretentiousness

Initially we were going to express our irritation about the black background of the pages, but found that the black background is not a problem. There are three overlapping groups of losers who make 99% of the black background on the Web - that’s the problem. They are: [a] Ponte consumers (“cooler-than-you” are art ), [b] anxious teenagers, and [c] trend-trapping windbag, who truly believe that a subscription to Wired magazine will make them fashionable. Tip: melancholy and pretentiousness bored. Those who burp out lousy rhymes and / or have a fetish writing only in lower case letters and / or trade in dull pictures of mediocre avant-garde art should cut their veins, or go to the commune, or do something else that will protect the Web from their self-loving shit.

corporate verbal diarrhea

We all saw them - these corporate pages, which primarily load some monstrous graphic logo from the underworld. And after you have waited a million years or three years before it ends, the rest of the page will abundantly spread about how wonderful this company is; perhaps there is a bit of a clumsy mess, just to get your address on their mailing list, and - no content at all. Advice to marketers: this is ineffective unless you set your goal to make the company look like one of the idiot imitators who think that having a web address gives them the appearance of key holders to success. This is not true!

hellish advertising

Do not you like advertising from the header of the page, which is replaced each time with the next visit? If you go back and forth between the title page and subcategories, every time you get the dubious pleasure of waiting when another graphic advertisement finally loads.

no email address for feedback

These guys want you to watch and listen to them, but they don’t want to hear from you. Isn't it curious that half the web pages from the Fortune 500 list of companies, such big names like McDonald's, don't want to tell you their e-mail? Demonstrating to you how surprisingly weak their customers really value. Another tip for marketers: such things expose your company to exactly the same arrogant, stupid and indifferent to its customers, what it really is. Consider the e-mail for feedback as part of the necessary masking.

cookie assault

Many web users do not want outsiders to shit on their hard drives, so that users can be tracked, scanned, analyzed and sold. Therefore, many users set up their browsers to make a request before setting a cookie. Now many users are extremely angry at the pages that are overwhelming them with streams of cookie installation requests. Hint: if the user rejects the first cookie, he does not need either the second or forty-ninth - transfer it with dignity. Every web designer who creates cookie-assaulting pages must be gutted with a blunt garden knife, “pour encourager les autres” (fr. “To give courage to others”)

Know, you in Hells extensions, if you see ...

incorrect HTML

A huge amount of incorrect HTML was presented to the world, as it sometimes passes unnoticed through the defective 'parser' of a popularly favorite bulky web browser. A designer deserves a prize for perversity, if he can provoke a radically different behavior in other browsers or browser versions.

Microsoft's "smart quotes"

Another sign of Microsoft's flaws is question marks that indicate where quotes should be placed. “Here? S an example, doesn? T it look illiterate?” - here's an example, doesn't it look illiterate? Tip: Cut down the so-called “smart quotes” feature in your Microsoft Word, dumbass. It generates Microsoft-specific characters that are not Latin-1 encoded; many browsers (rightly) raise their hands for fear of them. It is treated.

unstable extensions

We just adore when our browser freezes when the page loads, hangs for a while, and then shamefully drops. When this happens, you can bet the money that this page uses a bloated extension that no one even bothered to debug (and such an almost infinite number). Undoubtedly, the worst offense ...

frames

We used to say “frames for idiots” at the time when they crashed most browsers. Frames with frames are still the same; they devour the valuable screen space with their careless framing gizmos. We have to admit that frames without frames have uses - but if you use them, do it right. Frames that cannot be bookmarked, still suck, and links that do not replace the entire page when you make the transition, suck even more. Use frames with extreme caution.

Improve your page

I hear you say, “Well, you gave me a good lesson about how not to bend. Maybe there is something more positive? For example, what should be done and how can I improve my page? ”For you, my friend, I have three words. Content, content and content again. Give visitors a reason to be interested. Too many pages look like fairy tales told by idiots — full of pathos, but meaningless. Want to be interesting? Then forget about the graphics and brilliance. First of all, you should have something to say.

Suggestions?

Have a bad HTML design complaint? Write to us! <esr@thyrsus.com>

Please do not ask me to rate or correct your page. It's hard enough for me to find time to support my own pages. You can change my opinion only a bunch of money paid in advance.

Thanks

... Pete Glasscock, who inspired the creation of this page, despite the fact that he later disappeared from the Network ... Patrick Campbell-Preston <patrick@chaos.org.uk> for most of the "Hell extensions. ”... Rob Novak (Rob Novak) <rnovak@ibm.net> for“ hellish advertising. ” The rest, who participated in the creation of this page, asked them not to specify.

Another good tip

There is a nice sermon on web design from CJ Silverio . Horrible examples of bad tech are collected on Web Pages That Suck . The column by Jakob Nielsen “ 10 worst web design mistakes ” is also good. The Yale Style Guide is worth reading.

Translation: © Vadim, ckald, onb, Vladimir_M, Bubik.

translated.by translated by the crowd