Welcome to The HTML Hell Page

"Hell is other websmiths." -- Jean-Paul Sartre, updated

You Know You're In Design Hell When You See...

blinking text

Blinking text makes it nearly impossible to pay attention to anything else on the page. It reduces 87% of all surfers to a helpless state of fixated brain-lock, much like that of a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming semi. This is not good. If you abuse the blink tag, you deserve to be shot. Clue: if you use the blink tag, you're abusing it.

gratuitous animation

With animations you get the all the wonderful injuries of the blink tag with the added insult of the graphics download time. People who abuse these should have flip books rammed into every body orifice until they figure out that a two- or three-frame graphics loop is even less pleasant than that.

marquees

So, maybe you think the blink tag and cheesy animations are the worst abuse half-bright websmiths can perpetrate on your retinas? Naaahhhhh. For those times when too much is just not enough, the Great Satan of Redmond has given us <MARQUEE>, which allows you to create animated scrolling marquees at the drop of an angle bracket. This bastard cousin of the blink tag can cause vertigo and seizures in susceptible individuals, reducing them to exactly that state of drooling lobotomized idiocy that's such an essential prerequisite to purchasing Microsoft products. Coincidence? We think not.

garish backgrounds

The very next time we stumble across a page composed by somebody who thinks it's cool to use leaping flames or a big moire pattern or seven shades of hot pink swirly as a background, we swear we are going to reach right through the screen and rip out that festering puke's throat. If there's a worse promoter of eyestrain and migraines than the blink tag, this is it.

unreadable text/background combinations

The world is full of clowns who think their text pages look better in clown makeup, clashing colors galore (your typical garish-background idiot also pulls this one a lot). The magic words these losers need to learn are "luminance contrast". Your color sense is between you and the Gods of Bad Taste, but if you don't stick to either light text on dark backgrounds or the reverse, you will drive away surfers who like to be able to read without noticing the effort.

brushscript headings

Brushscript headings are rude. Unless, that is, you think every single surfer hitting your page truly craves the opportunity to hang out long enough to watch toenails grow while a brushscript GIF downloads just to display a heading you could have uttered in a nice, tasteful, fast font.

"resize your browser to..." instructions

Right. As if we wanted our browsers to take up that big a chunk of screen real estate. But what's really annoying is that most of the time these bozos get it wrong. Like, their browser has an 8-pixel offset, ours eats 20, and they forgot to allow for scroll bars so they're off by at least 30 pixels anyway and the display graphics are complete garbage.

You Know You're In Content Hell When You See...

hit counters

"You are the 2,317th visitor to this page." Yeah, like we care. On Yahoo's and Alta Vista's web it takes no effort at all to find and bounce off every page on the planet with a reference to (say) credenzas or toe jam. In this brave new world, hit counters are nothing but a particularly moronic form of ego display, impressing only the lemming-minded. They may tell you how many people got suckered into landing on a glitzy splash page, but they won't even hint how many muttered "losers!" and surfed out again faster than you can say "mouse click". To add injury to insult, hit counters screw up page caching, heaping more load on the Internet's wires.

stale links

Stale links are lame. People who have lots of stale links are lamers. OK, everybody has a pointer vaporize on them once in a while -- but haven't you noticed that stale links generally show up on a page in swarms, like cockroaches? That's because people with good web pages use them and hack them and fix broken pointers quickly so they're unlikely to have more than one at a time busted. A page with lots of stale links yells "My author is a lazy, out-of-it loser with the attitude of a slumlord running a cockroach palace."

pages forever under construction

Surfers learn quickly that for every ten "under construction" signs that go up, maybe two will ever come down before the heat-death of the Universe. This is stupid. HTML is not rocket science and prototyping pages is not a slow process. Anybody who can't find the time to clean the construction signs off their pages should yank them and take up a hobby better matched to their abilities, like (say) drooling, or staring at the wall.

You Know You're In Style Hell When You See...

pointless vanity pages

If we had a nickel for every home page we've seen that's a yawn-inducing variation on "Hi, here's me and here's a cute picture of my dog/cat/boyfriend/girlfriend" we could retire to Aruba with a bevy of supermodels tomorrow. Clue: if you don't have something to say, shut up. And keep it off the Web; life is too short for boredom.

angst and pretentiousness

We were originally going to vent our spleen at black backgrounds, until we realized that black is not the problem. It's the three overlapping populations of losers that compose 99% of the black backgrounds on the Web that are the problem. These are (a) cooler-than-thou art fags, (b) angst-ridden adolescents, and (c) the kind of coffeehouse trendoids who actually believe subscribing to Wired makes them hip. Clue: angst and pretentiousness are boring. People who spew bad poetry and/or make a fetish of writing in all-smalls and/or traffic in fuzzy images of mediocre avant-garde art should slit their wrists or join a commune or do anything else that will keep their self-indulgent sludge off the Web.

corporate logorrhea

We've all seen them -- corporate pages that start by downloading some monster logo graphic from hell. And after you've waited a million or three years for it to finish, the rest of the page has a ton of gush about how wonderful the company is, maybe some lame-oid promotion that's just a hook to get you on their mailing list, and no content at all. Tip for marketroids: this is not effective, unless your goal is to make the company look like every other moronic me-too outfit that thinks having a Web address will make it look like it has some semblance of a clue. Not!

advertisements from hell

Don't you love top of the page ads that are changed every time the page is accessed? If you're jumping back and forth between a parent page and a child devoted to a subcategory, you get the dubious pleasure of waiting for a new ad graphic to load each time!

no email address for feedback

These folks want you to look and listen to them, but they don't want to hear from you. Isn't it interesting that half the Web pages of Fortune 500 companies, the big names like McDonald's, won't tell you what their email address is? Shows you just how much these gutless wonders really value their customers. Another tip for marketroids: this sort of thing makes your company look exactly as arrogant, stupid, and indifferent to its customers as it actually is. Think of an email feedback address as a sort of necessary disguise.

You Know You're In Extension Hell When You See...

broken HTML

A lot of broken HTML gets inflicted on the world because it happens to get past the brain-damaged `parser' of everyone's favourite bloatware web browser. The designer gets the perversity prize if he can provoke radically different behaviour in different browsers or browser versions.

unstable extensions

We just love it when our browser freezes while loading a page, hangs for a while, and then ignominiously coredumps. When this happens, you can bet money the page is using a Netbloat extension nobody ever bothered to debug properly (there are a semi-infinite number of these). The worst offender is undoubtedly...

frames

Frames are for idiots. They flat don't work on many browsers, and core-dump many they're theoretically supposed to work in. They eat up precious screen space with frame widget cruft. And, used with sufficient ingenuity, they make it almost impossible to work out where you've been and how to get back to where you got there from.

Improving your web page

For you, my friend, I have three words. Content, content, and content. Give the audience a reason to care. Too many web pages are like tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Do you want to be interesting? Then forget the graphics and the glitz. First and foremost, have something to say.

Suggestions?

Thanks

...to Patrick Campbell-Preston <patrick@chaos.org.uk> for most of the Extension Hell section.

...to Rob Novak <rnovak@ibm.net> for "advertisements from hell".

Others have contributed to this page explicitly asking not to be credited.

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