Top Web Design Mistakes of 1999

I&#x27;ve said it before, I&#x27;ll say it again: it&#x27;s time to divorce the present browser into several different regimes:<p>• A reading app. Styled on ePub readers, services such as Readability &#x2F; Instapaper &#x2F; Pocket, or bibliographic tools (which serve to manage content for searchability client-side). Inclusive of forums-oriented software and feed-reading.<p>• An applications platform. Preferably with a consistent set of widgets (one of the key failures of present Web design).<p>• An e-commerce platform, with payment and security features integrated.<p>• Free-standing media playback tools (already substantively extant).<p><a href="http://redd.it/256lxu" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;redd.it&#x2F;256lxu</a><p>Web design is not the solution. Web design is the problem.<p>If I could have a tool to 1) remove all styling from a site, 2) reduce it to fundamental semantic markup (and here the HTML5 standard actually does provide a solid framework), and 3) apply <i>my own</i> preferred settings (fonts, margins, font-size, foreground&#x2F;background colors) to every damned page, with minimal styling allowed, I&#x27;d be far happier.

Almost all of this is still relevant today, except for <i>one</i> part:<p>&gt; 2. Opening New Browser Windows<p>&gt; Opening up new browser windows is like a vacuum cleaner sales person who starts a visit by emptying an ash tray on the customer&#x27;s carpet. Don&#x27;t pollute my screen with any more windows, thanks (particularly since current operating systems have miserable window management). If I want a new window, I will open it myself!<p>Nowadays, the bigger problem is on-page modal windows. Current operating systems now have very good window management, and browsers have zero window management, <i>except</i> for the ability to block popup windows[0].<p>I get very annoyed by websites that break my ability to open links in multiple tabs&#x2F;windows by right-clicking, or force me to use their built-in modal windows as a substitute for popups.<p>Most modern Google properties are culprits of this. For example: if you have a website with Google Apps for Business, it is impossible to open most links in new tabs - they force you to use the on-page navigation instead. The only solution is to open a second tab and navigate to the same location.<p>We became so afraid of popup windows that we&#x27;ve swung too far in the other direction, and are suffering the consequences.<p>[0] The solution is <i>not</i> to create a window manager for the browser, by the way.

On a related note: It&#x27;s amazing how miserable many popular &quot;mobile first&quot; &quot;hip&#x2F;modern&quot; sites are to actually use on a mobile data connection&#x2F;latency.<p>The modern web may be pretty, but it feels like general usability it at a low point.

Websites: breaking my back button for 15 years.

I don&#x27;t know if I should praise the author&#x27;s insight or scorn the rest of the world for not moving beyond these mistakes.<p>I&#x27;m just kidding... I know scorn is the right option.

&quot;appropriate behavior of these design elements is defined in the Windows Vista User Experience standard&quot;<p>This isn&#x27;t from 1999. Something&#x27;s amiss...

It&#x27;s interesting to read that, aside from actual design &quot;mistakes&quot; this article also includes some, I would say, etiquette based suggestions which seem innocence&#x2F;naive in hindsight. It wasn&#x27;t too much earlier than this that registering a domain name carried some sort of responsibility to create site that was appropriate for it. Boy, those days are definitely long gone!<p>Not using link-bait titles, always including a biography,not jumping on buzzwords, etc. This is definitely still fine advice for a quality site. At the time I certainly didn&#x27;t image the future web would be cluttered with sites doing absolutely anything and everything possible to get clicks and views.

4. Lack of Biographies &quot;My first Web studies in 1994 showed that users want to know the people behind information on the Web.&quot;<p>My first Web studies in 1994:<p>Internet Access<p>1. Log into Ralph. At the % prompt, type the following: telnet FSCAT.OCLC.ORG and press Return or Enter. FirstSearch responds “You are connected to OCLC Online Reference Services. Enter your authorization.”<p>2. Enter your FirstSearch authorization number and press Return or Enter. FirstSearch responds, “Enter your password.”<p>3. Enter your FirstSearch user password and press Return. FirstSearch responds, “Welcome to FirstSearch.” Follow the menus to search any database.<p>4. Use BYE to log off FirstSearch. Just enter bye and press Enter or Return. FirstSearch asks, “Are you ready to disconnect?”<p>5. Enter y for yes and press Enter or Return. FirstSearch responds, “You are disconnected.”<p>6. Disconnect from the Internet using the instructions on your screen.

Minor addition for 2014:<p>11) Breaking the scroll behaviour

what about text as images?<p><a href="https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;wwdc&#x2F;</a>

Regarding #5 &quot;Lack of Archives,&quot; it seems like most modern sites commit a sin that&#x27;s nearly as bad: lack of <i>reachable</i> archives. At some point the Web collectively decided that The Blog was the one true format for information delivery, and now everything is presented backwards and you need to click &quot;previous&quot; a hundred million times to see last year&#x27;s posts.<p>It&#x27;s especially maddening when people try to use sites like Tumblr for webcomics and serial fiction.

I tend to see the past 10 years or so of the Web as a great irony for accessibility. It looked like finally a gospel to blind users who could get a nicely structured textual information. In reality, so many websites are simply broken to them with Flash and prevalent DOM manipulation. And every time something good happens (like use of CSS to separate content), something horrible is newly introduced or abused on the other side of the planet.

This article has enlightened me about opening browser new windows. Forgive me father, for I have sinned.

The mailto one is invalid. There&#x27;s nothing wrong or unexpected about URLs having different URI schemes than http or https. In fact you can configure the browser to send mailto: links to your email website instead of launching an application.

If only the web stayed declarative...

Not using labels with radio and checkbox input elements could be on that list again.

Plus ça change...

A lot of them are still valid.