So, the original version of this rant (since I was freshly getting over having to deal with a certain game publishing company’s shitty website, being unable to reset my password because of some of the crap I’m ranting about here.) was considerably more profanity-laden. I’ve since had a cup of tea and calmed down a little, so it’s slightly more coherent. It’s still profanity-laden, though.
If you are the type of web developer who doesn’t treat everyone as if they use exactly the same browser as you and want to see the awful shit-stain^W^Wwork of art you’ve produced, then feel free to ignore this, or rant along.
Welcome to another of my rants, the target of today’s being web developers who commit the following stupid shit:
- Require JavaScript even for simple links on a page, because <a href=”…”> isn’t Web2.0 enough.
- Require JavaScript to load the text content of the page!
- Design and generate your websites entirely in Photoshop, with navigation/buttons consisting of an image with no alt text
- Construct awful monstrosities of websites that require wading through 5 million (a little exaggeration) links before you find the content.
To be quite honest, I don’t actually expect anyone who inflicts the above on anyone to read this or particularly care; they obviously don’t give enough of a shit anyway. However, I wanted to rant, so I am doing.
Anyone who knows me even vaguely knows that I browse the web with colours and background images disabled, since otherwise I end up with migraines or itchy-eyeballs; (that and web developers are lazy and don’t bother setting foreground colours (“Because everyone uses black on white, right?”), so I usually end up with white text on a white background. (Why set the background if you’re not going to set the foreground too? Inconsiderate bastards.)) the problem with this is that the same lazy web-devs who don’t bother with properly setting colours also tend to use images for navigation buttons, and then don’t bother with alt text. Which results in all the navigation buttons being completely invisible to me, and the site being utterly broken.
Now, if you’re going to tell me that’s my fault for disabling page colours and images, then you’re an inconsiderate shit. You’re also an idiot. (You’re also probably one of the fuckers responsible for this shit.) If you want things to look pixel-perfect wherever it goes, you probably want to step away from the web design and go back to designing things for print, where you can make everything line up perfectly, etc, etc, etc, print out PDF.
If you do want to stay in web-design, though, you might want to get used to the fact that it doesn’t appear exactly as you want it to; this is a Feature™. Also, another thing you might want to bear in mind: Handicapped people use the web, too. So checking your site with an accessibility tool is a must. A good one is Cynthia Says, which gives you a nice list of guidelines to follow to make sure that people can access your site properly.
Now! JavaScript! It’s a wonderful tool that can add some very neat features that can extend your site in ways that previously wouldn’t be possible. It’s also abused by idiots who seem to want to use it everywhere, simply because that’s the Web2.0 thing to do. Signs of these idiots are things like: anchor links that require JavaScript, just to emulate a standard link that takes you to another page of the site; having to enable scripts to get anything other than a blank page, since the scripts apparently grab the text of the article. (Which is usually compounded by the scripts mangling the layout so that you can’t read it anyway.)
Come on, people, what’s the point? Seriously? What’re you saving by having the JavaScript load the page? What do you have against people who use text-only browsers to play nice with screen readers?
Is it really so hard to make a site that isn’t completely and utterly broken for anyone who doesn’t browse exactly as you do?