Build Date: Wed Oct 30 19:50:08 2024 UTC
Who knew I could write something longer than a smug one liner.
-- Donkey Hotey
Ugly Web Page Tells How to Create Ugly Web Pages
2000-07-08 14:35:36
Reacting to all of the gratuitously ugly web pages on the world wide web, Patrick Lynch and Sarah Horton, along with the Yale University Press, have published the Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites. They've also put together a web site devoted to promoting the book. There's just one thing though, the web site is just plain ugly.
Pages with brown, blue, and black lettering on white and gray backgrounds. Page titles that use a smaller point size than body text. Advertising plugs to sell the book everywhere you look (sometimes more than once on the same page).
The introduction helpfully points out "Most of the design advice and technical information contained here on optimizing graphics in Web pages is tailored to recent versions (2.0 or later) of both Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer."
Hello? Anyone home? 2.0 versions of Navigator and IE are NOT recent versions. You'd think that people who wrote an ENTIRE BOOK about web design would know this.
The introduction continues "There is little here of benefit to users of text-based Web browsers, as the primary focus of this manual is on graphic page design."
Well golly gee guys, thanks. Do you REALLY THINK that people are out there combing the web looking for style tips to make their pages look better for users using LYNX? Did you REALLY NEED to point this out, or are you just so used to being long-winded Yale blowhards that when you start typing you just can't help but point out the painfully obvious?
The site continues with such mind-numbing gems as "Graphic user interfaces were designed to give people direct control over their personal computers," "research on the needs and demographics of your target audience is crucial," and "The goal is to provide for the needs of all of your potential users, adapting Web technology to their expectations, and never requiring the reader to simply conform to an interface that puts unnecessary obstacles in their paths." Well DUUUUUUUUUUUUUH!
About feedback, they have this to say: "Testing your designs and getting feedback from users is the best way to see whether your design ideas are giving users what they want from your site."
Here's some feedback for you Patrick Lynch and Sarah: Your site sucks ass!
T O P S T O R I E S
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
'Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch'
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
SF Hippies Can't Get Their Act Together
The annual 420 Hippie Hill event in Golden Gate Park, where large crowds of hippies, wannabe hippies, and hippie poseurs drape themselves in tie dye t-shirts and gather on a hill on 4/20 to smoke weed, was cancelled this year because the organizers couldn't get their act together. (More...)
Mozart to be inducted into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame
Joining such hard-rocking inductees as Abba, Chet Atkins, Nat King Cole, and Neil Diamond, the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame is proud to induct Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
Absinthia: The Pigdog Interview
Absinthe is making a come back for the Millennium. Even English people are slurping it down in pubs, eschewing their normal, healthy stouts and ales. And why not? Hell, if the planet is going to explode anyway, why not ride the DEATH WAVE in, and celebrate Y2K with the most entertaining and vicious elixir you can find? Come! Explore the "Absinthe Underground" with El Snatcher, Mr. Bad, and Splicer, as they interview the notorious absinthe bootlegger, Absinthia. (More...)
The Innocent San Francisco Mule
Flesh and Abby have moved to an isolated rural location in the United States - equipped only with their sense of adventure. Recently they came down off the mountain briefly to file this report? (More...)
Patient Joab's scientifick editorial discusses aspect of the space-time-beer continuum never before processed by sub-bush-robot minds!!! Too fabulantastic to contempulate! (More...)
Poor Metallica. All they want is to continue to put out the same weak "Heavy Metal" they've been churning out since the "And Justice For All" days? and make gooey wads of cash in the process. The problem is, people aren't buying their bound for the heavy metal scrap heap, over-produced, uninspired, tired crap. And let's face it, their various commercial endorsements won't pay for the lifestyle they've become comfortably accustomed to. Resorting to lawsuits makes perfect sense, when you need spending money. But just one lawsuit isn't going to pay their bills. So, to aid Metallica, I've composed an open letter to the boys in the band, with suggestions as to whom else they might sic their lapdog lawyers on... (More...)
The end of summer is near and sirens call of Black Rock City are beginning to summons Pigdoggers from all of the world to Burning Man. Spock Mountain Research Labs (SMRL), the world leader in beverage science and leisure technology will be at our second home for a week at 5:00 and Infant (how fitting) as we enjoy the liberated lifestyle of a temporary community 200 miles from nowhere... (More...)
It’s election night. My wife and I are holed-up in this hotel that my political party has rented out for the evening. Outside, people are being violently beaten for whom they voted for. Is this South Africa? Perhaps we’re in Haiti or some Southern state during the 60’s. Of all the places where this sort of thing happens, it’s mind-boggling that we are in Portland, Maine. (More...)
