too bad (Score 2, Informative)

I remember using Minitel maybe 10 years ago when I lived in Paris briefly. It was nice because it was very, very focused. There were no banner ads, no flashy graphics, just plain text and enough buttons to get the job done. There's no technical reason we couldn't have the same thing on the Web, but because there is so much more you can do, we get sites like Amazon's (not to pick on them; they're all bad) with 500 options that take forever to load on slow connections and nobody really wants anyway. And don't even get me started on embedded Flash movies.