My WWW Pet Peeves

Excessive use of frames

I believe you should have to have a licence to use frames. It's just too easy to use them irresponsibly. Don't use frames without a good reason.

Excessive use of images

Many people have neither the time, nor the money to load all the images on a page. They had better be pretty spectacular if I am taking 10 minutes to load them all up. A few images is okay, but your page should be readable without them. To find out what your page will look like with Lynx, a leading text-only browser, try Lynx-Me.

The click here syndrome

It's just plain annoying. Imagine if someone wants to print out your page. It's called hypertext, and the text which is hyper should mean something. Also, keep in mind that not everyone uses a mouse.

Awful colour schemes

It is seldom a good idea to have yellow text. Remember, people have to read your pages. Make them easy on the eyes. Keep pages with such colour schemes short. Anything of a significant length should probably have black text against a soft background. Beware of backgrounds with writing on them. It's possible to do it right, but if done wrong, it can make the whole page completely unreadable.

instead of text

This is incredibly inefficient. A much better way to get fonts into your pages is to use a style sheet. For more information on this, and many other topics to do with HTML, visit the W3 Consortium.

"This page is Netscape/Microsoft Internet explorer enhanced"

Stop the warring. Don't you realise you are playing into the hands of the corporate giants? Your pages should be viewable on A Web Browser^(TM). Anything else restricts your audience. These days, it's probably not true anyway, Version 3 of the two most popular browsers are practically identical.

"This page is under construction"

Far too many pages display this message. If a page is in working order (i.e. all links are completed, all text is accurate), then it is NOT under construction. If you intend to change it soon, by all means put a message saying so, but saying under construction implies that it will be finished. Web pages should be dynamic, and never be finished.

Columns

Columns are a device which aids readability in print, but on a web page it does not. I read one column, then I have to scroll all the way back up to the top to read the second column, thus the page is harder to read. It might improve readability if my browser is already too wide and your page is shorter than my screen, but how will you know?

"Please resize your browser to read my page."

I would be interested to know if anyone has ever resized their browser just to read one page. There's also the slightly less insidious "This page best viewed in 24 bit colour", nice pictures are okay, but I think people will be able to tell when their monitor is unable to display your images correctly. Unless your page is specifically about the images, it shouldn't matter too much.

Slow Web counters

Web counters are really annoying when they delay the whole loading of the page because the web counter server is overloaded. See if you can get your ISP to provide a web counter locally, or even better, give you access to the server logs.

Follow/don't follow these guidelines, and I will award you the or the emblem to display on your page. Please note that if you follow these guidelines, and I hate your page anyway, I may add in extra rules. If you disagree with these guidelines then by all means wear the icon with pride. Don't send applications to charlton@ihug.co.nz