Few things make me angry these days. However, some things cannot be ignored by my hate. I've been in the CS field since the mid-90s, and I've seen many "revolutions" go through, some bad, some very bad. None of them any good. Here is a handful of many, many complaints from the latest trend of nonsense website design.
Advertisements and useless scripts are 99% of my bandwidth.
This might sound like a minor complaint today, where we have "infinite memory" or some other nonsense that Software Engineers seem to cling to these days. Sadly, none of that was ever true, and none of it is good practice.
Take for instance, The Huffington Post. Upon connecting, 118 unique third-party sites slam my computer. Why, you ask? Social media plugins decide to load script upon script of garbage that I, and countless others shall never click. When is the last time you shared anything with Orkut? Be honest. Zero, right? Yet, these scripts load and execute for little reason other than to waste your time. Over 4 dozen cookies are forced into my hard disk, some of them mentioning sites that I would never visit, or care to visit. Let me repeat that. Four dozen cookies are created upon visiting the Huffington Post front page. Why? Who cares? All I know is that I wasn't notified by the site of any of this, yet they are required by law to do so in the UK.
Upon checking any news sites like NBC News or CNN, Flash ads may load video and display it. The size of that video? over 40 Megabytes. That's a 40MB Flash ad taking 320x200 worth of my screen real-estate. the actual content I wanted to read? A mere 5 Kilobytes, HTML formatting and all.
This might not seem like much to you, but on a smartphone with a common plan like Verizon (With a data cap), 50 Megabytes per page visit starts to add up. Given that most sites aim for the iPhone (or the stupid Blackberry) and leave no options for Android phones, those Android users are slammed with a hefty "normal" website.
Corporations that control wireless communications have not caught up with the evolving Internet. As more people move from PC to tablets and smartphones, our "big data" ways must be rethought. When the difference money-wise goes from (doing the math from my plan) 1 cent for the mobile version of a site, to $2.00 for the main site (on ONE load of the page!) something needs to give.
Then there are memory issues. Most Android phones have 512MB to 1 GB of RAM, and an underperforming ARM CPU. If you as a designer think that your site will scale to that, you're wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
The "Stop" button on the browser is useless.
Remember the "stop" button on the browser? The button that claims to stop loading page content? It's a liar. the Stop button hasn't been working in quite some time. Some browsers, like Chrome, have removed it completely, or combined it with the reload button. Firefox doesn't have one at all.
So what happened to that button? AJAX is what happened to that button. As soon as web designers decided that dynamic content, instead of static, easily accessible content was the way to go, scripts became dictators of your bandwidth. No more can a person mentally calculate from visuals how much data their browsers suck up - it's invisible. And, if you disable javascript altogether, 80% of the most popular sites on the Web no longer operate.
This isn't an attack on social media websites like Facebook where dynamic content makes sense. It's more directed at news sites and blogs that run pointless twitter feeds or "Search feeds" that load posts on social media sites based on search criteria. I go to a news site to read text. I don't go there to see scrolling tweets about what Kim Kardashian is doing. If I did, I would click that article myself.
Some sites, like Tumblr and Twitter, are visually simple. There isn't much "content" to see, but look under the hood and you'll see a mess of scripts and clever CSS hiding of so many elements, you wonder how it even works. This is the equivalent to a child hiding his toys under the bed and claiming his room is clean. It's not clean at all. It still exists, and it still takes up valuable memory on mobile devices, and precious CPU time. Why, for instance, are login scripts active on Twitter when a user is already logged in? Does a vector animation script need to execute (and lag webkit rendering) every time I like a post on Tumblr? Does Twitter and Tumblr both need huge JPGs scrolling on the login screens, wasting CPU cycles, my bandwidth, and my time?
The answer is no.
This isn't much of a problem on main websites as much as it is a problem for niche interest sites, like fan wikis. Many small wikis like to feature animated content. That is fine, but using a format not supported in the HTML standards is not only a bad idea for future-proofing, but it also deprives users that have less popular, standards-compliant browsers from experiencing content. A great example is the Animated PNG. While it was dismissed from consideration by the PNG committee, Mozilla devs thought it was good enough that they would implement it in Firefox anyway. And why not? After all, GIF is limited to 256 Colors per palette, per frame. Animated PNG would mean 24-bit color and alpha channels! The problem? It's not standard.
This isn't an attack on social media websites like Facebook where dynamic content makes sense. It's more directed at news sites and blogs that run pointless twitter feeds or "Search feeds" that load posts on social media sites based on search criteria. I go to a news site to read text. I don't go there to see scrolling tweets about what Kim Kardashian is doing. If I did, I would click that article myself.
Simplicity doesn't stop at what the user sees.
Some sites, like Tumblr and Twitter, are visually simple. There isn't much "content" to see, but look under the hood and you'll see a mess of scripts and clever CSS hiding of so many elements, you wonder how it even works. This is the equivalent to a child hiding his toys under the bed and claiming his room is clean. It's not clean at all. It still exists, and it still takes up valuable memory on mobile devices, and precious CPU time. Why, for instance, are login scripts active on Twitter when a user is already logged in? Does a vector animation script need to execute (and lag webkit rendering) every time I like a post on Tumblr? Does Twitter and Tumblr both need huge JPGs scrolling on the login screens, wasting CPU cycles, my bandwidth, and my time?
The answer is no.
Standards are set for a reason.
This isn't much of a problem on main websites as much as it is a problem for niche interest sites, like fan wikis. Many small wikis like to feature animated content. That is fine, but using a format not supported in the HTML standards is not only a bad idea for future-proofing, but it also deprives users that have less popular, standards-compliant browsers from experiencing content. A great example is the Animated PNG. While it was dismissed from consideration by the PNG committee, Mozilla devs thought it was good enough that they would implement it in Firefox anyway. And why not? After all, GIF is limited to 256 Colors per palette, per frame. Animated PNG would mean 24-bit color and alpha channels! The problem? It's not standard.
Mozilla isn't the only offender. Google decided to implement a "webp" ( pronounced "Weppy") Format for its Google Maps feature. Google does provide a fallback, however, but the fact remains that it is not a "standard" format, and therefore, sites can be designed, once again, to be best viewed on specific browsers, something that HTML5 was designed to prevent.
And years later, even after tech news reporters trumpeted "the death of plugin prison", we see Flash on the web, and Apple users are still left in the dust.
And years later, even after tech news reporters trumpeted "the death of plugin prison", we see Flash on the web, and Apple users are still left in the dust.
The Web still sucks for handicapped users.
This one is a personal pet peeve of mine. My grandmother had glaucoma, and from the results of that disease, cannot see the thin, crisp text that I can see easily. Not to mention that Cascading Style Sheets sometimes make websites into a blurry, colorful mess. So, most browsers set up for the blind do not honor CSS. What do these users see? They see lines and lines of meaningless text that would otherwise be covered up by "clever" style sheets. The result of this is that the main content is shoved down to the bottom of the page. Some sites refuse to show the content at all if CSS is disabled. Why? Because screw you, that's why.
Most Internet users that don't have these disabilities will simply retort, "download a plugin", or tell them to use a browser that converts these atrocious websites into something palatable for Handicapped users. The problem with this is that those browsers are not mainstream, and thus, don't get the rigorous testing that popular browsers get. This opens up those users to exploits. I can't think of a worse scenario right now than a legally blind user being compromised as he or she struggles to read the text on the screen. And I haven't even discussed the issues for those who require braille or screen readers.
There is a web browser for the visually impaired, called WebbIE, but it is UK centric, even though it is available in other languages. It is also not supporting HTML5 properly.
So, what to do?
To be honest, there's not a lot we can do. When simple design got the boot in the mid 2000s, and "Web 2.0" showed up to make current browsers of the day scream in agony, this battle was already lost. When I can use the wayback machine and experience, on average, the same content that I can experience now, but at a much lower memory and CPU footprint, it saddens me.
If you want to see a wonderful relic that's still updated to this day, Google "Netscape News". It's one of the fastest loading news sites left. BBC used to hold that title with its "Low Graphics" mode, but it is now gone. Google still supports many old browser user agents from Nokia phones, so spoof as a Nokia to get a much smaller site with 100% of the content.
However, these sites may too be swallowed by the "Web 2.0" bandwagon, with 100 social media scripts slapped on, and of course, those lovely 30 Megabyte video adverts. It's only a matter of time.
And before anyone states the obvious, "get a better computer", I also have something to state. Build a better site. That's not a snappy retort as much as it is a plea. As more people use the Internet, websites will need to be redesigned to accommodate many browsers, form factors, devices, and most importantly, people. Only once does form need to reign supreme, not function, at least in the way that Web 2.0 has defined it. People do not want "function" on a web page. They want to read. After all, The Web is still text, not a television.
We're not full "Idiocracy" yet, but we're getting there if we don't do something about it.
