This is the first of a series regarding the abuse of what otherwise would be an at least somewhat enjoyable medium (the interwebs, duh). Each part will address an often-made mistake, and go into detail about why certain things should be avoided like the plague.
We'll start with perhaps the most evil of 'em all:
THE BLINK TAG
Never include page elements that move incessantly. Moving images have an overpowering effect on the human peripheral vision. A web page should not emulate Times Square in New York City in its constant attack on the human senses: give your user some peace and quiet to actually read the text!
Of course, <BLINK> is simply evil. Enough said.
Jacob Nielsen, 1996
MySpace. Fundie sites (both the religious and political varieties). Knock-off product sites. What do they all have in common?
An incessant assault on the optic nerves, by means of animated GIFs, flash banners… and the <blink> tag.
An often asked question on Yahoo! Answers is about "how to make text blink". Sadly, there's always some ignorant dimwit that, instead of rightly berating the questioner, answers the question.
Read more »
Done.
Finally. Only took me a week.
Let me know if I missed a beat or have my facts all crookeded and incorrective, and such. Thanks. 
First episode (contains links to all five parts) can be found here.
Working on an extended tutorial, the beginnings of which can be admired here:
http://tutorials.allyoushouldknow.com/web/startawebsite_one/
It's still in progress, so don't be surprised of links that lead nowhere yet.
I could not possibly say it any better than a guy named Doug Vanderweide, right here: Stupid Web Site Tricks.
There are times when I just want to reach through my monitor, and grab some ignoramus by his or her collar and just… shake them, all the while simply yelling NO! NO! NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! at the top of my lungs, and in their face.
Yes, the design of my main pages is a straight copy of a ready-made WordPress template, mea culpa. I started working on my own CMS, but life (as it does) got in the way so I abandoned that idea for now. Anything outside the realm of the read subdomain, though, is hand-written and hand-coded and hand-designed.
And I'm not using any fancy stuff to detract from what I have to say.
Mister Vanderweide, sir – I tip my hat to you.
(This article's title was blatantly stolen from the article quoted here:)
Smart quotes are best left for e-books, physical books in print, PDF documents and any non-HTML related document. If you want to increase the portability of your ezine articles, do the smart thing and turn off Microsoft Word’s smart quotes or do a search/replace before you upload your next article to the web.
Microsoft Word Smart Quotes and Article Marketers Don't Mix
So true, so true.
If I can go one day without seeing one of those “stupid broken quotes’ I'd be overjoyed. Some otherwise very interesting articles become practically unreadable because they're riddled with broken text. I can (sort of) live with the plain old � thingee… but too many of them really make for an agonizing read.
And besides that, if the article is about code, and frickin' code examples are littered with smart quotes… you just turned a simple copy/paste action – the reason the code is there in the first place – into an exercise in patience and futility.
People… it really isn't that hard to prevent this from happening (and in the same breath prevent yourself or your authors) from looking lazy or just plain ignorant.
Spend a second looking at a document before you toss it into that textarea field. Run it through word and do a search and replace. Turn off those gosh-darned smart quotes. The Web is not ready yet for WYSIWYG… not by a longshot. Work with it, and people will be able to actually read (and appreciate) your articles again.
Thank you.
The Wrong Way | Mehdi | 
August 19, 2008 21:45 | 
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