Things I dislike on the Internet
- Websites that use your referrer to highlight your search terms when you click on them from Google search results. This is a pretty useless feature. When I search on Google, I am generally not searching for words, I am searching for concepts. It’s not necessary for you to highlight every occurrence of the words install, air, and conditioning on your blog entry about how you installed your air conditioning. I’ve found what I’m looking for; thanks.
- Websites that use a Flash object to display text in a specific font. I appreciate that you really like Myriad Pro and that not everyone has it, but that’s not what the Web is about. A web page is not an enticing blank slate of typographical possibility, like a freshly opened Adobe InDesign document. It is a portal for interoperable communication between people of largely heterogeneous platforms. And most crucially: The selection algorithm used in these Flash objects is just plain terrible, and it will never be anything but terrible, because it can never have access to the operating system’s text selection API.
- Websites that insist dates or phone numbers be in a specific format. Honestly, you’ve got a million-dollar website and the developer couldn’t be bothered to write the code parse MM-DD-YYYY and MM/DD/YYYY? It doesn’t take much — even in ASP.
- Websites that have a giant list of countries ordered alphabetically, and don’t stick United States up at the top. I wonder how many of these sites’ users are actually from the United Arab Emirates. (Heck, I don’t even mind when the US shares the penthouse suite with Canada; just don’t give it to Afghanistan with its 500,000 Internet-using citizens.)
- News articles that automatically highlight key words like “Sarah Palin” or “Yankees” with links that take you to so-called “related articles.” I don’t know about you, but when I’m reading a news story involving Obama, I don’t generally think, “after this, I’ll go read a bunch of older news involving Obama!”
- Security questions. Because someone who knows what high school I went to and what year I graduated could only be me.
- “Tweet this” links on someone’s blog post about the chicken pesto they ate for lunch. ’Nuff said.
- Websites that alter your clipboard to include attribution. Honestly to me it’s like a violation of personal space. It’s my clipboard to decide what goes in it, so back off.
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