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Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to HTML5

econsultancy.com

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Re: Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to HTML5

#71

Post by Kronopath »

> ...I’ve never used this site before, so immediately asking me to create a free account is absolutely pointless...

Kind of ironic when the very website this article's on has a bright red rising banner asking me to "Join FREE as a Bronze member".

Relating to the content of the article, I find it interesting and rather frustrating how these days pop-up windows are making a comeback. These were so annoying that every major browser at the time came with a pop-up blocker, a trend that continues today. Except nowadays the pop-ups are little HTML/Javascript doodads built into the webpage itself, which means pop-up blockers don't work and will likely never be able to.

Re: Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to HTML5

#72

Post by visualcsharp »

th0ma5 wrote: post #48
iron_ball wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, most of this rogues' gallery is digital agencies or sites made by digital agencies. Sadly, those businesses market to unsophisticated customers on the basis of flash and dazzle, and usually any attempt at user advocacy is met with requests for flash and dazzle. The target audience of this kind of site is not the end user who visits the site; it's the manager who signs off on the invoice. Those mana…

Thank you for posting this. I both always wondered what I was thinking about such sites, and also had problems capturing the mindset of the audience when I wanted to make sites like this!

I call it "bamboozling people with bullshit."

Re: Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to HTML5

#73

Post by icebraining »

driverdan wrote: post #64
jakub_g wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be regulated somehow (yeah, I know, I sound like an 19th century guy). But probably lobbyist won't give up on that easily. I have disabled all that crap in my adblock, but there are millions of people who are not that savvy / aware etc. My friend from Germany told me that in some (but not all) the pages, there are dummy social buttons loaded by default, you have to "enable" them. Try any article at [1]. I…

Disable 3rd party cookies, tracking woes averted.

Unless they use any other tracking system, like ETags[1].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_ETag#Tracking_using_ETags

Re: Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to HTML5

#74

Post by chimeracoder »

How about forcing keyboard shortcuts that are impossible to disable?

The two biggest offenders of this are Google Groups (the new layout) and wired.com. Both have mappings for "H" (capital), which I use to go back a page (via Vimium).

However, they decide instead that this should hide all the content and leave me on the page.

In the case of Wired.com, it sends me to a random article.

Worse, Google Groups refuses to load at all if I disable Javascript, telling me I must activate Javascript in order just to load a mailing list archive.

Re: Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to HTML5

#76

Post by dreen »

jakub_g wrote: post #57
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I keep wondering: Does anyone actually use these social buttons? The suppliers of said social buttons do; every time you see one while you're logged into FB / G+ / Twitter, a hit of you visiting that site is registered at said parties, and they can all, thanks to the prevalence of these sharing buttons, track your internet usage.

This should be regulated somehow (yeah, I know, I sound like an 19th century guy). But probably lobbyist won't give up on that easily. I have disabled all that crap in my adblock, but there are millions of people who are not that savvy / aware etc. My friend from Germany told me that in some (but not all) the pages, there are dummy social buttons loaded by default, you have to "enable" them. Try any article at [1]. I…

Learn to block Javascript selectively, for instance using NoScript you can block JS from Facebook unless you actually are on a facebook.com domain. This gets rid of the annoying social button functionality.

Re: Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to HTML5

#77

Post by LandoCalrissian »

fdej wrote: post #55

The trend that annoys me most right now is that image thumbnails never just point to the large image: instead they pop up some JS-based overlay that obscures the whole page. There are several issues with this: * Quite often, for whatever reason, the overlay takes seconds to load (much longer than just loading the image) * If the image takes long time to load, I cannot just put it in a background tab and continue brow…

The thumbnail one drives me crazy. All I want to see is the original full size image, yet many sites make this incredibly difficult to do for now reason. Not really an HTML5 problem though, just a general image gallery problem.

Re: Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to HTML5

#78

Post by Wintamute »

Who are these people that want the web to be some sort of sterile, perfectly conformist, UX's wet dream? Flash is still warm in its grave, and people are already blaming it for crimes that HTML5 hasn't even really made yet. Don't get me wrong, when the function of a website is to perform a task or convert users into paying customers then by all means streamline the crap out of it. The sites that do that well will succeed, the ones that create an unusable mess will fail, simples. But don't go around pointing fingers at everyone trying to make something innovate or different. Make no mistake, a lot of the well accepted web2.0/native app tactile/animated interface elements we take for granted now were birthed during the frenzied experimentation of the mid 2000s Flash era. I for one am occasionally delighted to visit a site with an off the wall animated interface, tiny fonts and crazy navigation. It's food for thought, sometimes inspiration. Yeah, maybe they got it horrible wrong, but its creative.

And besides, this guy is really scraping the bottom of the barrel here. 404 a "HTML5" problem? Auto-playing vidoes a "HTML5" problem? Low contrast colour schemes a "HTML5" problem? Has he even got the slightest clue what "HTML5" is as opposed to other HTML versions? All the examples in that article are just shit sites, nothing to do with "HTML5". Gimme a break, this is just link bait, what a joke.

Re: Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to HTML5

#79

Post by lttlrck »

fdej wrote: post #55

The trend that annoys me most right now is that image thumbnails never just point to the large image: instead they pop up some JS-based overlay that obscures the whole page. There are several issues with this: * Quite often, for whatever reason, the overlay takes seconds to load (much longer than just loading the image) * If the image takes long time to load, I cannot just put it in a background tab and continue brow…

And many "lightboxes" suck on mobile.
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