It is so typical that when anyone expresses a
desire for privacy, the listener jumps to the conclusion that the
speaker has 'something to hide'.1 Get
over it Not all of us, believe it or not, are after fame and
glory! Some of us just don't think our private affairs, no matter
how benign or non-existent, should be in the public domain.
When I was first convinced by Puppet that I ought
to have a web-page, I believe we were on about HTML(1.1). I loaded
the page with images, sound, doodads and experimentation. However,
frankly I'm fed up with pages suffused with QuickTime, Flash, and other
resource-hogging gimmicks to provide me with moving pictures,
ear-splitting music and four links. It's most especially irritating
when the page won't even allow itself to be viewed unless you enable
javascript for it and six other sites.
When you create a site/page with a chosen
background color or image, please chose a text color that goes
reasonably well and is visible to those of us with bad eyesight.
And don't forget table backgrounds and the like. Thank you.
I'm so sick of pages that refuse to function unless
I condescend to use IE (which I almost never do). If I were to design
a page with a certain browser in mind (or out of it, rather), I'd design a
page which was absolutely impossible for anyone using IE to see. And
if, perchance, any page I write accidentally foobars IE because it's looking
for misconstructed links (for example), good. Perhaps the user will
get fed up and go looking for a decent browser.
Here's one hint, I'm sure there
are more.2
Dear Webmaster, what is the use in designing a website
to defeat adblockers by not functioning properly with one or more running?
I'm not about to click on any of your spam, so why do I need to be
bombarded with them? Yahoo!? Are you listening?
Gene Wolfe—fabulous writer, The Book of the New
Sun, yet even he must interrupt my zombified reading with the
the highly annoying 'try and'. Case in point: "I'd try
and say yes, but I'm afraid the effort would kill me."
Please people, you do not try and do something, especially when
you are going to do neither. You either try to do it and succeed,
or try to do it and fail.
1If you
dislike my use of quotation marks vs ending punctuation, see
here,
paragraph 2. It's a strain for me as well, since I'm also something
of a writer freak. You'll find I'm not exactly consistent.
2See
also
this
opinion from the Fishbowl.