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What I Hate on Web Pages

This used to be an anti-Netscape Extension page (BLINK will plague us for a long time). But the problem is more general, and I am replacing it with my modest suggestions to Web page writers.

There are good collections of mistakes and annoying "features" to avoid while writing Web pages; my favorites are Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design by Jakob Nielsen and HTML Bad Style Page by earth.com. Still, I could not resist presenting my own list.

On the positive site, don't forget to consult All Things Web.

Extremely Hateful "Features"

IMG elements without the ALT attribute.
Not everybody browsing your page can (or wants to) see your images. If you omit the ALT attribute in an IMG element, you are probably making your page hard to browse without loading the image. This is even worse when the IMG is used inside an A element, since it may be impossible to guess the content of the linked page (or even to follow the link). If your page is really useless without graphics (and most probably it isn't), you should write an

ALT="Sorry, you really
need graphics"

attribute. For further discussion, visit the page on use of ALT texts in IMGs in the text-friendly authoring topics.

BLINK.
Extremely distracting.

Background Images.
Background images in strong colors are obviously hateful, and make text completely unreadable. Background images in pale colors may look cool for a while, but they are useless, annoying in the long run, and they make reading text very tiring.

Clickable imagemaps without a text alternative.
They combine the problems of IMG elements without the ALT attribute and of Big Useless Graphics.

Animated Images.
Worse then TV commercials. See BLINK.

Moderately Hateful "Features"

Frames.
When you write WWW pages, frames often look like a great idea. But when you try to browse the same pages, they get in your way. If you still don't understand how many people hate frames, try a google search. Most people agree at least on the facts that frames break navigation, and make it very hard to bookmark and to view HTML source.

Forcing Background, Text, and Link Colors.
This "feature" may go from merely confusing (what is the color for visited links in this document?) to hateful (this yellow background is killing my eyes!) to totally unreadable.

Big Useless Graphics.
Please help save bandwidth, avoid Big Useless Graphics. If you must put Big Useful Graphics on the Web, put a thumbnail on the referring page, so only people who really want it will download it. Noting the image size (bytes, not pixels) near the thumbnail is very helpful.

HTML errors.
Always check your pages with a good HTML checker. Yes, even if an application wrote the it for you. I suggest the "official" W3C HTML Validation Service.

Non-standard Markup.
Support freedom of browsing: make your HTML conformant to a World Wide Web Consortium standard, such as the XHTML 1.0, HTML 4.01, or even the old good HTML 3.2. Avoid non-standard extensions. Join the Campaign for a Non Browser Specific WWW.

Annoying "Features"

Misuse of TABLE.
Many Web sites write an entire page as a TABLE in order to control its layout. This usually makes the page really ugly, but the worst result is that a browser cannot start to display the page until it has been loaded completely.

Massimo Campostrini, Massimo.Campostrini@df.unipi.it