Cheesy Quintessence

Today I read an article claiming that MySpace’s design works. The article extensively makes excuses for the simplicity, ugliness and inconsistency of MySpace’s design, justifying it by claiming that it’s effective for the target audience. While I would agree that a design need not be complex or filled with eye candy like so many sites’ designs are, the article’s other points are fairly ridiculous.

Consitency in design could be attained with less complex code if MySpace would make correct use of CSS. Why waste time to look crappy and inconsistent? Because of the way it’s coded, what consistency MySpace does have is extremely time-consuming to maintain (for example, stylistic HTML attributes are everywhere). Even if the target audience doesn’t care, the exhibited cluelessness of MySpace’s web interface coders is costing them time and money (especially in bandwidth costs, considering this is the 7^th most popular English site on the web).

Another point made by the article is equally ridiculous:

MySpace permits users to do almost anything to the look of their profile pages, and the prevailing aesthetic is decidedly “more is more”: more color, more animation, more typefaces, more sound, more of everything makes a better profile page.

Of course, properly styling a MySpace profile is impossible (not that it matters anyway, considering the inherent validity of a MySpace page’s markup). Additionally, since MySpace is stuck back in 1995, using HTML attributes to change the presentation of almost everything, it’s impossible to customize the look of specific elements of a profile. As a result, anything you can do to customize a MySpace profile will look even more hideous than the design of MySpace itself.

Today, only several months after the fact, it came to my attention that Google’s homepage has, in the advent of Google accounts, been completely revamped with a “personalized home,” which turns the seach page into a portal. The personalized homepage is packed with totally spiffy DHTML (just like everything else Google makes these days) that lets you drag modules around. Additionally, Google lets you choose the modules you want to see, such as Gmail, weather, news from all over, et cetera, and even create new modules based upon any RSS you like. Plus, the Homepage API allows people like me to make completely new modules; neato!

As much as I dislike inaccessible HTML, which Google loves to produce, I was pretty impressed as how well this thing works; when I opened the left panel to customize the page, the page smoothly moved aside, and smoothly moved back when I closed it. When I dropped a module I was dragging, it smoothly dropped into place–it’s almost as pretty as OS X in action. Kudos to Google’s programmers–they must have spent a lot of times beating their heads on the wall to get JavaScript to work that well.

Now I might actually view Google’s homepage from time to time. Though I know you Firefox converts haven’t had integrated search since 2001, it’s been that long since I had any reason at all to view Google’s homepage.

I’ve cleaned things up around here; the site name is cheesier, the HTML is greasier, the CSS is tastier, and, amazingly, it all holds together in Internet Exploiter now! Thus, if you refuse to move to a decent web browser, you can finally view this site, although it will probably take the browser several seconds to exercise the necessary script by Dean Edwards before the page will be rendered properly.

Also new is the latest comments list on the blog and my list of college classes under general info. If there’s anything anybody thinks I could do to make the site look a little better, let me know.

You’ve likely stumbled upon the successor of pop-up advertisements: DHTML pop-ups. These advertisements utilize JavaScript to change the CSS positioning of a block element containing an ad. A pop-up blocker will not stop them because they don’t create windows; all of the event takes place in the web page itself. Additionally, the “close” buttons on some of these elements have a secondary function of opening a pop-up window, which will get past many pop-up blockers because the browser will interpret it as a requested window!

Why don’t advertisers seem to understand that people will not tolerate this crap? It’s really unfortunate that JavaScript is going to be abused in this way… because I’m to the point of turning it off almost all of the time. Browsing without JavaScript is much faster due to excessive use of it, as well. Perhaps the advent of such JavaScript abuse will change the approach Google has been taking with its more recent projects, such as Gmail and Google Maps, both of which absolutely require JavaScript.

But since there are a few sites out there that still demand JavaScript, I think it’s time that browsers take an accessible and intuitive approach to JavaScript permissions. My ideas…

1. Incorporate a JavaScript whitelist or blacklist, at user’s choice; much like Firefox’s pop-up, image, and extension installer lists.
2. Add handy buttons to add or remove the currently viewed server from the whitelist or blacklist.
3. Add an option to refuse JavaScript from off-page servers.
4. Add a quick, per page option for JavaScript permissions; much like Opera’s image loading options.
5. Add numerous JavaScript options pertaining to the manipulation of CSS. Extra points if your whitelist/blacklist can individually change each server’s permission to each of these.

Today I finally wrote a page that renders correctly in Internet Explorer. It was a difficult feat, but I managed somehow.

All designers planning to write standards compliant pages for Internet Explorer should follow my lead.