I think the average citizen would make a better web designer than a lot o’ so-called professional web designers simply ’cause they don’t try the excessive nonsense that web designers do & nobody else would e’en think to do ’cause it’s so insane. It’s the equivalent o’ someone bragging ’bout how amazing they look & then suddenly shitting all o’er their pants; they expect users to marvel @ their prowess, but ’stead we turn up our noses & cringe. Ugh. It’s the power glove o’ web design: ’stead o playing a perfectly good but “drab” controller, you fuck round with a glove like a jackass.
Take login forms. A novice who just learned HTML from 1 o’ the millions o’ O’Reilly books out there would create a basic form that would load to a basic “¡You’ve logged in, Jim!” page. Boring & less than 1% accurate in regards to the user’s name, but operable.
Now, let me tell you ’bout the login page o’ some website that shall go unnamed, like Voldemort. ’Stead o’ using a basic page, it uses a custom window made with a div & CSS magic.1 & since this is a div, it has no scroll bar; if you use the actual window’s scroll bar, the div will simply stay in place while the website you can faintly see ’hind it scrolls ’cause the div uses a fixed position. Now, ¿what happens when a vital element — say, the confirmation button — is off-screen? The answer is that you’re fucked; you can’t use the form. I e’en tried pressing Enter or highlighting with my mouse downward. Nothing worked. I’ll tell you what I did do: give up with disgust @ the scent o’ the designer’s feces-filled drawers.
I could try to give mo’ examples, but thankfully my mind’s blocked them out like traumatizing moments. I do remember 1 website long ago that was s’posed to help teach me web design & had the brilliant idea to have the navigation bar’s text rotated 90° so that you had to crane your neck just to see it. I still don’t e’en know how they did that, much less what made them think ’twas a good idea.
Here’s a common example from others who have seen this problem themselves, albeit 1 that’s rarer & a bit hyperbolic: magic JavaScript links. ¿Who needs boring ol’ anchor tags with their lame-ass semantics & SEO advantages when we can waste memory & bandwidth to load some JavaShit that does the same thing?
To be fair, many designers in general do this. It’s why my laptop mouse randomly clicks things when I move it ’cause the genius designers wanted to show off their awesome ability to click when you lightly tap the mouse pad ’stead o’ using the click button just below it — you know, what you do every time to put your finger on the pad so you can move it @ all. They were wrong: they didn’t prove themselves to be awesome; they simply shit their pants in front o’ everyone. It’s the same reason many DS games, including the otherwise awesome Wario: Master of Disguise & the always not-awesome Diddy Kong Racing DS2, were made mo’ frustrating by the MIC, whose mood swings determine whether your heavy blowing for minutes straight into it does anything or not. ’Gain, the designers thought they were being brilliant making something that easily could’ve been controlled by a simple button use some new control; ’stead they made the Power Glove 2.0. & they shit their pants in front o’ us all & made us all look ’way in shame.
¿Is that what you want, designers? ¿To watch so many people look @ you in disgust while feces slides down your pant legs all o’er your shoes? Then don’t do all this fancy shit. Just make the shit work intuitively & call it a day. As Vincent Flanders said, “Nobody e’er complained that a site worked too well”.
& for god’s sake, ’nough with the arbitrary rules for filling out forms. I must’ve wasted half an hour waiting for a page to load so it could tell me there was an error ’cause some jackass web designer arbitrarily decided that commas weren’t valid characters for a superfluous catch phrase they forced me to create or that it must be within some narrow range o’ characters. Said designer probably thought they were clever figuring out all o’ the code to create these limits & this wacky new security measure. They weren’t. They only wasted my time having to clean up all o’ the excrement they sprayed all o’er my walls.
I also loved the government site that had a quite low ( my 1st name barely fit, & it’s not that long ) character limit for names. Presumably this is purely to satisfy the nostalgia in fans o’ ol’ NES RPGs, since I can’t imagine their servers being so weak that they can’t handle strings with mo’ than a dozen characters — ¡you might as well ask them to host your MP4s, man! ¿What happens if you’re real name is too long? You’re fucked, that’s what. Better shell out the money to legally change your name just so you can pay your debts. You don’t want creditors calling you & having to respond with, “Sorry I couldn’t pay today; my name doesn’t fit in your website. I tried to pretend my name was ’Sebast,’ as I always named Cecil back in 1992, but then I was put in prison for not mo’ than 5 years”.
