Seven client-side web peeves

The web is not about technology, it’s about communication. Yet, in the ultimate schema of things, it becomes evident to the end-user only via HTML and clever client-side jinks. Despite our clever plans, middleware, and thousands of hours of social meddling, we are stuck with ouputting to a 1024px wide box encapsulated in virtual chrome.

Everything has moved on in a quantum fashion, but the client-side experience (HTML, scripting, CSS and even HTTP) is found wanting. Here are some of my main peeves that I feel web developers should address. Add to this list, or set me right:

1. Not enough rich client-side apps
We have Ajax; we have great JavaScript libraries like JQuery; we have JSON and Spry; we even have the clockwise spinning wheel which even hotmail users know means “hang on, we’re bringing you data. Don’t leave this page”. Use ECMA. Even though it sounds like a horrendous skin condition.

2. Implicit www
Marketers and outdoor media billboard designers love to make the succinct pay-off line: mycompany.com. It saves space and sounds cool. When the poor schmuck types it in, a 404 error appears. Why? the guy who set the server up didn’t check the box that allows implicit www. It’s like sending a letter to someone in the same city and writing “South Africa” after the address (I make the assumption that users don’t type in the implicit “http”). Don’t force us to type the three Ws.

3. Pop-up windows
Not the cheesy ads, but when content is opened up on a link via JavaScript (window.open). I am a big tabbed windows user, and read a page while opening up others in tabs. You can’t do that with JS windows, and they are not indicated as such. I’m a fan of title tags be applied to the link, to say “this link opens up a new window”.

4. Deprecated support for font
The current generation of browsers still support the font tag. Probably the biggest browser/HTML mistake since Netscape 4.72.

5. Drop-down menus
You can’t have enough of these. Well, only one per site. But it should be exhaustive. I’m not convinced users like clicking on a heading saying “About us”, and only once the page loads do they get a sub menu on the side, and find that the stuff they were hoping to find is not there, and they need to click all other main links to get it. Bandwidth has improved, granted; but surfing has died out. Our well-documented “fear of clicking” has become “annoyance at hunting”.

6. Poor SEO
Menu items as images are the worst. Headings as text a close second. When I try to view a site on my mobile phone, these hardly ever display as desired. This is a usability, accessibility, navigability and stupidity crime.

Also, for those who view source: I thought it was an open secret that Google has treated this with less weight over the years, cutting it down to 30 keywords and then dispensing with it all together. It may carry some indexing weight, but loaded meta tags tell me more about the developers than the content of the website…

7. CSS number formatting
This is not so much a peeve as a wish. CSS should allow Excel-like formatting of numbers. This means putting a raw number in an element (td or span), applying style and the style formatting the number. So you control decimal spacing, commas, colours if negative etc.

HTML 5 brings some helpful elements to the table, but none of them are answered with my peeves. I could take a look at the W3C site, but: academic text is one thing; IT academic text is something different; IT academic text from a bureaucracy head-quartered in Switzerland is a chapter in Kafka all by itself.