I think we did this one before, but everyone always has something to gripe about.

I told you mine -- those javascript pop-ups that keep you from right-clicking on some pages. The purpose is to keep you from stealing images, but honestly, when I'm right clicking to open a link in a new window, and I get a little message that says, "Tsk, tsk! Don't steal!" I find it rude and insulting, and I want to slap the owner of the page. And generally, I don't go back.

What's your pet peeve?

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

Answers

Wow, I've never seen that one. Sounds very annoying.

If we're just talking web pet peeves, it's still animation.

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

Noise. Definitely noise. The person who invented MIDI must die a horrible LOUD death.

Dynamic fonts are, however, moving up quickly on the list.

The javascript popups don't actually bother me that much. All you have to do to disable them is to turn off Javascript in your preferences. Has the side benefit of disabling free sites' popups AND dynamic fonts. Has the side effect of disabling style sheets, which may or may not be good, given a particular site.

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

Using a background color that makes the text unreadable--blue on green, black on red or red on black or pink. Yellow on green or pink. Anything on pink except black. Also, using combinations of colors which make your eyes bleed. I hate when that happens.

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

that little script that prevents your back button from going past the page you're on. like it keeps routing you to the same page and there's that little '0' character in your 'back' list. i *hate* that. really really really *hate* it.

takes a lot to inspire that sort of feeling about something so trivial, but it bugs the hell out of me.

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

People who e-mail you (after obviously only looking at maybe one or two of your pages) and say... "your page is great, I'm linking you. Can you link me please?"

Having no intention of linking these freaks, I still go to their page anyway to see if maybe lightning struck them and they should be so blessed to get the coveted covet link. Lo and behold, their page says something along the lines of "Elecrotnititiccia" or "Mutated" or "Devil slut whore princess." And/or "Welcome to my page!"

Now, all that said and done, xeney, when are you going to link me, in your next entry, right? I say profound things every day, more often than Stee does, and plus ummm, I'm cuter.

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

Midis. Not being able to right click. And the one that makes me completely see red: being stuck in somebodys frames.

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

For me, it's colors. Not enough contrast between text and background colors. A background image that makes it impossible to read the text. There are a surprising number of those. Do people just put pages up like that so they can say they have a web page? They might have something interesting to say, but I'm not going to take the time to read it if they haven't put any thought into the design.

My other thing is big honking graphis that haven't been optimized.

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

Midis. Animations. Poor text/background choices. Lack of an alt tag. Badly formatted framesets that don't make use of the TARGET="_top" or TARGET="_new" attribute. Slow load times because of hugely hideous background images or other large elements. Sites that link to documents that aren't HTML pages but don't SAY THAT anywhere so I wind up with Adobe's PDF reader popping up out of nowhere.

Um ... sites that don't let me resize the font. (These are rare, but despite my joy at finding that a certain writer had returned to the "journaling scene" was dashed by the fact that I cannot resize the fonts on her webpage and they're too freakin' small.)

Actually -- any site that forces me to turn all java support off and view with my preferences, instead of the page code pisses me off.

If I can't read your page without resorting to re-formatting it myself, I get quite tiffed off.

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

Midis. Animation. Those oh-so-cool flash pages that aren't smart enough to realize you've been to the homepage already so you have to sit and wait for the dazzling intro to play again before getting back into the site. Sites that trap other pages in their frames, deliberately or otherwise. Sites with no navigation on the internal pages. I hate having to go back to a homepage to find the next section. Sites with inconsistent internal navigation. (Like one page will have "back|index|email|next" and the next page will have "index|next|back|email").

People who want me to add their site to my (Medieval & Renaissance Wedding) webring when their page consists of nothing but a date and "More coming soon!"

Those damn JS popups for sites like Tripod that don't go away even after you've left whatever page they host.

And why do people email me about OTHER people's websites? "Do you know when it will be back up?" etc.

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

People who don't use height and width tags for their images. I have to sit there and wait and wait and wait for the page to render properly. I have a pentium 75 with a 28.8 modem, and if I try to click on a link it won't be there because of course that'll be the moment that the images load and suddenly the page looks really different. Less of a peeve are alt tags. Please use them. Tell us what the image does, or what it is. If it's obvious, then alright, but at least leave a blank alt tag. Sheesh.

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

background sounds. large/unnecessary graphics, or overly complicated design in general. (i'm a staunch minimalist when it comes to web design. if i can't get around your page with a text browser, i won't come back at all.) lack of height/width/alt tags for graphics. popups (but everybody hates those). pages so heavily laden with java that they cause my poor netscape to crash.

god, i hate the web.

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

Black text on white backgrounds - like on this site.

I'm on the computer all day and I'd rather read white text on a dark BG. When are all these Webbies and programmers going to realize that staring at a glowing white computer screen is not as pleasant as staring at a white page in a book.

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

Ugh. Gotta disagree, white text on a dark background makes me want to poke out my own eyes with a dirty stick...

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

Are y'all using some weird third-party browsers where you can't customize your environment? The Big Two permit you to rid yourself of most of the above-listed annoyances.

Boxes that I have unchecked in my preferences:

Show images [yes, really. My Ricochet modem is convenient but slow]

Show video

Animated GIFs

Play sounds

Allow page to specify fonts

Enable plugins

Enable ActiveX

Enable scripting

Enable Java

---

I used to have color-specification disabled, too, but this made surfing such a drab experience that I flipped it back on. The only time I run into problems with this is if someone has a dark background image with light text and fails to specify a bgcolor for those of us with images off. If bells and whistles irritate you [and who doesn't find whistling irritating?] you can rid yourself of them. Set your colors to white-on-black and get down with your bad go

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

Java. Pure and simple java applets. Switched off Java permanently in my browser several months ago and haven't looked back since.

Tonight We Sleep In Separate Ditchesa Java-free zone

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

Midis. Fucking midis. Godforsaken goddamit stupid midis that automatically turn my system's volume control up to earbleeding level to play some shite introduction that makes me slap my keyboard silly in the effort to get it to shut the fuck up!

midis. Especially midis that don't provide you with the option of turning the fucker off, but just play and play.

For the most part, Midis!

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2000

I have another one, added to my list yesterday afternoon. I searched for the term "AdobeFonts" on Yahoo. Of the eight or so hits I got on that search term, two were legitmately about Adobe Fonts. The others? Pornographic sites. So, people adding misleading or inaccurate or completely false keywords in their meta tags are now officially cheesing me off.

-- Anonymous, January 27, 2000

Automated pop-ups are a menace, but even worse are pornsites masquerading as software sites. You're looking for some program or other and, if you're not careful, they lead you to a bogus site which doesn't contain any wares whatsoever. The moment you want to leave, your browser opens a zillion new windows, all containing hardcore porn.

Of course, your boss always chooses that particular moment to enter the room.

-- Anonymous, January 27, 2000

My pet web peeve is HTML geeks who think everyone who puts up a web site should also be an HTML geek, and that they should design their pages so that the oldest PC and modem that might be out there can view their site quickly and easily.

My view is that people using anything less than a 56K modem should *upgrade* already. Same goes for people using old PC's. If they can't afford to or just don't want to, fine, but complaining about how slow everything works is not going to make the web slow back down to the speed it operated at 5 years ago, just to please people with very old hardware.

-- Anonymous, January 27, 2000

I hate the Midis. I hate that javascript thing people do so that disables the right click. I hate unreadable fonts and bad color combos of bg and text. And I don't much like animated gifs either.

Colleen

-- Anonymous, January 27, 2000

my dislike of bloated web design is an aesthetic preference rather than a practical one. i have a 10Mbps connection at school, so i figure the web is as fast for me as it is for anyone. but in general, the more "stuff" on a page, the uglier and more difficult to navigate it is, imho.

i don't expect complaining about it to do anything. but that's part of the pathetic, hopeless nature of a pet peeve.

-- Anonymous, January 27, 2000

Also, a big hater of disabled right click. Also understanding the need to slap the people who disable it. Hello? Your image? Already in my cache. No need to disable right click. Loser!

Ok, and Flash. Flash for the sake of saying "look, I know how to do flash" - way to go if you learned a new skill, but just put it on a page and link to it so I can admire your talent....don't put it on your index page and make we wait through 7 mins of load time just to watch a badly drawn cartoon just to get to the rest of your site. Because I won't.

And my biggest peeve. Don't steal from me. If you need to take my crappy, handwritten, mistake laden source code to build yourself a page, you are truly a pathetic human being.And if you are stealing the rest, well, I have a lot of free time and I can be very petty and vindictive. So far this month someone has stolen the bio from my site, my photo (which they used on their journal site, as if it was them!) and my code - not just a site that looks like mine, but the actual source code, right down to the meta tags, without a thing (including typos) changed. And that is just the stuff I have found.

-- Anonymous, January 27, 2000

I still haven't seen any of these disabled right click pages - point me to one, okay?

I hate MIDIs too - I keep my sound off all the time for this reason.

Another thing I hate is links that open a new window, but I realize that's just a preference nobody agrees on.

About modem speeds, I have a 56K modem now but the phone lines in my area are such that I can't get above about 24K. They claim they'll upgrade the lines "soon." I can't really justify paying for DSL. So I appreciate simple pages.

-- Anonymous, January 27, 2000

Hey Kim --

Actually, as I said previously, my peeve _is_ having to use the browser prefs to force appearance.

I do want to see what creative people are up to, but I don't want to be going back and forth constantly between turning my prefs off and on.

I've got my prefs set up a certain way, but I don't usually apply them unless I have to in order to see a site.

-- Anonymous, January 27, 2000

Stupid flash pages with buttons that aren't clear until you do a mouseover and then you have to remember whatever the hell it is you saw on the other five of their buttons (look at volkswagon.com)

frames that don't target correctly

people who don't use a background color

pop-up windows on geocities and tripod pages (yeah, yeah, I should talk)

too much busy-ness and blinking and animation

gobs of white space and gobs of graphics that are too damned big

As a web geek:

having to write code for ranger stations in bo-dunk who have shitty computers and having to code for unix *bleah*

having to create menu systems for stupid people

cleaning up someone else's shitty code

Stasi: she is linked to your page...now stop your whinin'! :P

-- Anonymous, January 27, 2000

MIDIs. Like everyone else, I hate 'em. My sound's turned off, so don't waste my time loading some soppy piece of music I would loathe if I could hear it.

Images that don't have height/width tags, so I'm stuck sitting there for hours waiting for pictures to load when I could be reading. I read FAST. I get bored FAST. Rob R-H, I might be looking at you. I keep coming back for your unfailingly witty prose, but the WAIT!

Badly written Java. Can't tell you how often it happens: "loading Java"... crunch.

People whose websites are so f***ing cool and bleeding-edge that they have a black-on-black index page with bleak, mystifying cartoon mouseovers to direct you to the various manifestations of their ego. Cut me a break and communicate.

Just-plain-ugly design... or lack of same. No coherence. No consistency. Use of twenty different colours just 'cos you know how to make something coloured. Page elements scattered about at random. That grey background that means, "I didn't bother figuring out how to change the default." Fifty different bits of clipart sprinkled about the page 'cos, "Nifty! I have a shareware clipart disk!"

Advertising. Worse yet, animated advertising. Punch the **&*&^&* monkey. I will never do anything that involves me putting my credit card number on the web. I don't watch TV. My ad tolerance is low. Chances are, I will never support your site by clicking -- no matter who you are. Even though it was buggy, I'm thinking about going back to AdsOff.

People who tell me how I should set up my browser. Chances are I like my browser just the way it is. If your brilliance won't survive my preferences, too bloody bad for you.

-- Anonymous, January 27, 2000

Hey, Judy, I'm one of those people who likes to whine about the use of bleeding-edge, overwrought technology on web pages. That's because ninety-nine point nine percent of the time all that crud doesn't add anything to the content of the site. I was recently compelled/coerced into downloading Flash because Douglas Coupland's site (www.coupland.com) is unviewable without it. (Using a browser without Flash installed causes the viewer to be shuttled off to a "you're going to have to get these plugins sooner or later, so go do it now," page.) Although I haven't thoroughly examined the site (I saw most of the content prior to the Flash-oriented redesign), nothing I've seen so far has actually required the use of Flash, Javascript, or any of the other wingdings he's got goin' on. His 2000 Tour Diary, for example, could just as easily have been done with frames; each entry is an image with text below it, and a bar across the top of the page from which the user selects entries. For that matter, it could have been done *without* frames. And since the whole diary is in the form of a pop-up window, it's impossible to bookmark it and one has to navigate from the index, three jumps away from the content, every day.

(Funnily enough, the pages load dog-slow on my hardware and Douglas and I have exactly the same computer: a PowerBook 3400c. You think he'd be sympathetic.)

Your ship might still float with two tons of boulders in it, but you should ask yourself before you cast off whether you really need those boulders or whether they're just weighing you down, making you burn twice as much steam and allowing the waves to wash over your poop deck. The purpose of the 'net is to get information from the site to the user. Anything that impedes that process -- by making it take twice as long, requiring plugins, etc. -- should be discarded if they're just extra ballast.

The things I put up with for Doug! I can't wait to meet him tomorrow night. I'm so smitten I may not even flip him any shit about his double-hulled tanker of a site.

.........

-- Anonymous, January 28, 2000