rchandraonline's Journal: Will the JavaScript onslaught EVER stop????

(Or, why Web 2.0 and beyond is a frakking mess)

Life was simple. We clicked on links, or in the case of Lynx and eLinks, we hit the ENTER key. The forward button took us forward, whilst the back button generally took us back (unless, of course, that would POST, and it was usually a Good Thing to prevent a user from automatically POSTing again, considering the semantics docuemented for it).

Then some were a little dissatisfied. They thought browsers needed a little more oomph, and generally, they were right. JavaScript and DHTML were pretty good ideas in their infancy. There were big wins all around. JavaScript for example can validate fields on a form, and not even bother the server unless all form elements meet the intended criteria. It definitely saves a round trip, in that the server doesn't have to interpret the query string or the POST, find it's wrong, and prompt the user again for the missing or incorrect information. DHTML can provide a tabbed-looking interface, using the visibility attributes to make sections of the page appear or disappear (I really like that about the Sipura SPA2000 for example).

Mind you, the Web already had some other problems, such as font size specifications. A lot of sites sprang up that for no other reasons than piss-poor design looked terrible to the point of being illegible. I'm speaking of course of everything being laid out in "px" when really the Web weenie designer doesn't know whether 1px represents 0.2mm or 1mm on my display. So of course those designers that insist on laying out everything to the pixel don't realize the text they've just laid out is only legible by a housefly or a flea.

So what do I have to do? Why, at first, that's fairly simple. My favorite, Firefox, has a setting not to allow text under a certain size, so it in effect clamps the px value to (in my case) 14. Of course, those Web weenies rain on even this parade by specifying line height by px instead of as a percent or relative size (small, large, xlarge, etc.). So then their text gets all squashed on itself. (Take note here that I don't quite know whether to blame the Gecko layout/rendering engine or said Web weenie, but I'm leaning towards the latter.)

This is also not to mention lots of stupidities, like specfying a text color with a background color (or worse, image) with too low a contrast. Or choosing a text color and assuming noone *EVER* changes their default background color from the blinding white. So of course they wonder why they're not seeing the problem in their own browser when I tell them their text is difficult to read because it doesn't contrast enough with the background. But I digress; this merely shows that Web 2.0 wasn't necessary for several HTML abuses. Let us return to the abuse of dynamic content.

It wasn't long before certain designers caught a glimpse of the capabilities of this newfangled JavaScript and DHTML when....you guessed it...they started abusing the crap out of it.

First came menus. Now mind you, actually menus can be an extremely Good Thing(tm), even in a Web application. But what in essence has happened is: 15 or so years of UI design and experience got totally reinvented, and not in any improved way. It's been my 20+ years graphic experience (starting with the Amiga 1000 in the mid 1980's) that Web applications are the SOLE uses of menus that will activate just by the act of going over them!! At the OS and WM levels, menus don't do squat, except for maybe highlight the title, UNTIL YOU CLICK ON THEM!!!!!! This is good; content is not obscured until the deliberate action of actually depressing a mouse button happens. Until then, EVERYTHING REMAINS VISIBLE! This is something that seems to have been utterly lost by the latest wave of Web misdesigners. This is also not to mention their menus will look utterly terrible if again they adhere to this principle of specifying every last God forsaken thing in px instead of relative dimensions. And dammit, when I click somewhere else, OTHER THAN the menu, I >>EXPECT<< the menu will go away.

But it doesn't stop there. That wasn't good enough. Then misdesigners wanted their little doodads to slide across the page. Then they wanted to make most of the page shaded while some other area was bright. And again, they decided to lay this all out in px...not percent of the window, not relatively...all in px. Why the frak not? After all, everybody has the exact same video controller set to the exact same parameters driving the exact same monitor, right? Right?? What? Why...why the heck not?

It's really simple. There are differing pieces of hardware to meet differing needs. There just is no practical way to lug around the video real estate I have at home, a 21" monitor, in a laptop. I run that puppy in 1600x1200. If I were to attempt that on the average laptop, virtually everything would be illegible. So making a design assuming 800x600, or even 1024x768, is just plain impractical and stupid.

Please, folks...don't waste my time with your cutesy bouncing windows or sliding pop out forms. Just put the God-blessed stuff on the page (or change its visibility), and BE DONE WITH IT. If you're going to have some sort of ancillary form to fill out, DON'T tantalize me with content that's darkened and put your snot on top of it; make it a @#$$% other page. And when I click somewhere OTHER THAN your blasted window, get your Godforsaken trash out of my marmlefrakling way!! Don't put some "close" button or "X" on it; get it out of the way, and don't try to be my window manager! I've selected one myself (Metacity), and I don't need you to select your own concoction for me.

Don't EVEN get me started on how Flash has ruined pages with its cutesy animation that makes me wait to get my navigating done. I left one domain registrar in the dust because of it. They decided their basic page wasn't good enough, that their menu titles had to float in from all over and assemble themselves on each page visit. All cutesy is is attractiveness for the first 5 or so times I see it, then it becomes an UTTER waste of my time.
And while we're at it, enough with the windows already!!! I am a perfectly functioning adult that does NOT need you to manage my windows for me!! Again, I chose Metacity for this task; I DON'T want you to reinvent this. I am absolutely perfectly capable of right clicking on a link you have provided and deciding whether I wanted that link to appear in the same window, a different window (open link in new window), or a new tab in the same window (open link in new tab). GODDAMMIT, DON'T TRY TO THINK FOR ME!

Alas, I used to like SourceForge...a LOT. Extremely unforunately, they have succumbed to several forms of Web 2.0-itis. No longer is there a simple, uncluttered way to navigate; the content gets obscured by the mere fact of accidentally wandering over their menus. It's as utterly simple as using onclick instead of onmouseover or onhover, but lamentably, it seems they've not put any forethought into this. They just blindly went with the rest of the trashy design of most of the rest of the Web.

And perhaps even more lamentable, this very site has also been charmed with bright/dark windows and other annoying such crap. Hell, to make this blog post without a crapload of distractions that is this Web 2.0, I had to disable JavaScript.

One even more insidious thing I've been seeing lately is a crappy FEEDBACK widget with a rotating + and - between brackets. Every few seconds it has to change from a + to a -, and every time I scroll the page up and down, it skitters all over the place along the right side of the page. This is YET ANOTHER reason I reach for PrefBar's JavaScript tickbox to untick it. I first saw it on Avaya's support site, and it's been infecting more and more sites on a monthly basis. It's just annoying and distracting. I'd MUCH rather see you clearly put a feedback link at the top and bottom of the page, or make it part of the usual "contact us".

Actually, this whole sour experience started today (well, intensified from what it already was) when I went to schedule a payment for my Discover bill. I remember receiving advanced notice that their Web site would not be available at such-and-such a time on such-and-such a date for whatever length of time because they would be updating and ....AHEM!!..."improving" it. It was quite good as it was, but I thought, hey, whatever they want to do to (try to) snazz it up, let 'em give it a try.

The very first thing I get blasted with after logging on was that "dim the main content" whilst putting up a "window" on top of it. It says something about updating my security settings, which I think, what the heck, I'll give this a whirl. Actually, it was pretty good...except for the fact it wasn't a real window, and I couldn't just click the main content to the top, because I was really interested in what balance I'd have to pay off. Once again, I have a window manager, and I don't want you ("you" as in Discover/Novus, or at least their Web designers) to be it. So...not really wanting to, I clicked their little "close" widget (I wasn't done with their security forms, 5 pages in all, and I would have far preferred just to put this window in the background for a bit while tending to other things.) Plus, I noticed once again they had fallen for the fallacy that everything could be laid out in px, because one of their submit buttons only partially showed. But again, do I blame them, or do I blame the Gecko programmers? It's a much easier argument to blast the Web designers for lack of thought...they COULD choose other ways to accomplish the same thing, but they don't. Presumably they're a crapload more worried about presentation than functionality, and that's a crying shame.

The one thing you should never do is lose functionality. To my amazement, I see something that looks like a log out button, but alas, there's nothing behind it. It's not a hyperlink, it's not an imagemap, it's nothing at all. The sole way I know of logging off the Discover Account Center site is to time out. That's just not at all good. I very much liked the fact that the log off button was moved to a much more easily located spot, in the upper left of the page (it was in varying spots on the right of the page, depending on the width of the currently opened window). But to stick it there with nothing actionable to back it up...inexcusable.

And while you're at it, how about some deeper regression testing? I wanted to write them about some of these deficiencies, so I look on the page. Near the bottom, it says "Contact Us" as usual. Yep, that's EXACTLY what I wanted to do. So I click on it. I didn't watch too closely; what this was was yet another instance of the abuse of JavaScript and window.open(), which of course I've told Firefox to open in a new tab, not a new window. I go looking through the list of links (there's dozens of them, ostensibly to thwart tens of thousands of emails a day asking the same things over and over), but of course somewhere near the end of this I see something to the effect of "send a secure message to Customer Service." Bingo, this is exactly it. But to my disappointment, it says I have to log in to do that. Huh...that's funny, I thought I already logged in. No matter, click the log in now to send a message -type link, and I log in again. I went and found the contact us link again, click it, found the "write to customer service" link again, and it asks me to log in (again) to do that. It's at this time I notice I have about 5 tabs in my window, the leftmost of which was my originally logged in page. Again, enough with the window.open()!!! If I really want to do that, I'll right-click and choose that menu option!

I'll just have to say this much though. Not everything Web 2.0 is a disaster. Look at Google Maps and Gmail for example. Every time I use them, they are unobtrusive, and do really cool things (like being able to drag maps and have missing pieces get downloaded, or anticipate possible completions based on what's typed already, and giving me a dropdown list of completions). While some of those features (completions based on current typing) violate some of those complaints above (obscuring content), it's actually quite minimal, and it leads me to believe they really worked at not making it as annoying as a lot of these other sites.

After all...Google are the juggernaut of search engines. Why? There's a few reasons: relevant results (most important...this would be PageRank), free to use, simple but powerful search terms (like site: and such), but most importantly in UI design, advertising w/o being obtrusive. They don't have banner ads, only sponsored links just under the search blank and along the right of the page. No flutter downs, no slide ins, no make-it-dark-til-you-click-here...just a few very short ads near the top and along the side, text only ...no Flash, no animated graphics. THIS is why they are the giants of the search engine world.

Take heed, Web 2.0 designers. The VERY EXISTENCE of the JavaScript tickbox in PrefBar, the very existence of NoScript, the very existence of Grease Monkey ought to give you pause, and tell you you're not doing a particularly good job. The very last thing you want to be doing is annoying your visitors, but it looks like the final result is that you are. Otherwise there wouldn't be much need for those three mentioned pieces of software, among others which I'm sure I'm not yet familiar.

C'mon, get serious now. Your annoying, distracting antics only reinforce one really simple concept: just because the speedometer WILL indicate up to 200 doesn't mean you should drive ANYWHERE NEAR 200, or at least not the majority of time. Yes, on occasion you want to hit 200 or so, beacuse just look at what designers like Google have done. But don't use a feature just because you can. A Web widget without serious function behind it is just fluff and a big waste of time, and sometimes purely a source of annoyance and frustration.