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And they say they're matchless.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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You'll cause a stink if you do!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Why do so-called designers think that large areas of blank, white space is a good thing?
Is this a plot by huge, High Definition screen vendors to drive sales? In the good old days the key thing about displaying information on a screen was to provide such information in a compact, readable form with interface fields glaringly obvious (such as text entry,buttons, etc.).
Now it's all about using invisible scrollbars (once you guess where they are and hover over that area long enough) to plough through huge acreages of blank space just to read more than a couple of lines at a time.
In addition, the text is squeezed between huge stock photos that are barely relevant and jump, scroll or wobble around the screen like that old April Fool's code that made dialog box buttons dodge your mouse when you tried to click on them.
..and half the time buttons are just some text you have to know to click upon.
Example: The other day I went to UPS/FedEx/whoever to track a parcel. There was some huge text somewhere in the middle of a large blank area that said "Tracking #" (note the "#" instead of "number", despite the huge surround white space available).
So I tried typing the tracking number - didn't work, I needed to click on the entry field to get focus.
Where is the entry field?
I clicked on the text, nothing happened;
I clicked on the blank area immediately to the right of the text, nothing happened;
I clicked on the blank area immediately below the text, nothing happened... hmmm.
I clicked randomly in various places around the screen and then tried typing, nothing...
...until finally I found that if I clicked below the text about an inch (or a couple of centimeters) below the text and started typing, the number finally appeared! Yay!
There was no flashing cursor, no text entry border or shadowed area, no different shade of grey or colour to give a clue where to type; you just had to click randomly until you found the area that responded. Hovering around to see the cursor change to a text entry cursor didn't work anymore - there was no cursor at all during text entry, the mouse pointer didn't change or even move to follow the entered text. What numpty thought that was a good user interface (sorry, User eXperience)? I'm surprised I didn't have to scroll down to find it! Actually, I would have had to if I was on a smaller screen or not running full-screen.
To sum up: Grrrrr!
Thoughts?
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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In theory, usage of space should be to prevent a page from being an eyesore.
In practice, boil-plate website produced by entire corporations of script-kitty's all use the same templates to make an endless supply of look-alike websites with the readily available stock photos.
So what else is new?
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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If you can keep your head while those about you are losing theirs, perhaps you don't understand the situation.
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I like the coding one a few images down. The code projected on the dude sitting in front of the screen is readable. That means it's mirrored on the screen. He must be an elite programmer...
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Forogar wrote: There was no flashing cursor, no text entry border or shadowed area, no different shade of grey or colour to give a clue where to type; you just had to click randomly until you found the area that responded
I know it's not a solution to the moronically bad design you rightly complain about, but most pre-made "You. too can build a website for your company, with no training!" templates do automatically assign tab-order values, so you might be able to click on the field label and hit the Tab key, to position the cursor.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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That's an idea I didn't try but would probably have worked.
However, you and I are developers and know these things. Most of the customers are not and would not know this so, once more, a useless UX!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Well, they've got plenty of space on the page to explain how to do it.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Did you get the "how was your experience today?" email from them?
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I agree.
Would a black background be better? (I don't think so.)
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But-but-but it's all about making pages look cleeeeeean, and scrollbars and control edges make everything look too busy.
Whatever. But as far as I'm concerned, a web page and a pamphlet serve different purposes. Don't turn one into the other.
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dandy72 wrote: scrollbars and control edges make everything look too busy
ms says that the scrollbars vanish to allow people to focus on their work (the morons actually use the word "focus").
Everyone else in the world says that they can't focus on their work because the f***ing scrollbars keep vanishing.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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There is nothing like "let's just quickly do something before starting the next big task" and then half an hour later be so annoyed with what was supposed to be a simple task on a simple web page that you can't even concentrate on your actual work anymore.
My plan is to live forever ... so far so good
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This.
I used to be able to position the mouse on the down arrow button at the bottom of a scrollbar and leave it there, so as I'm reading text, I can just keep hitting the mouse button to bring up the next couple of lines and keep reading.
But since the scrollbars (and the button) now disappear, clicks register against the canvas, and not on the scrollbar, which is no longer there, so the click events do nothing. So, I have to move the mouse around to bring back the scrollbar, then reposition the cursor on top of the down button, then click it. Then a second later the button disappears again, so I have to repeat every time I want to scroll. Using the cursor keys isn't always an option, as you can have multiple levels of windows each with their own scrollbar, so the cursor down event might be going to the wrong target. Positioning the mouse on the button removes that uncertainty.
Needless to say, this is not improving usability.
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When I see sites like that I like to inspect the code and more often than not I discover something that leads me to believe (with a high degree of confidence) that the site was written in Ruby on Rails. Or maybe Django. Not that I haven't seen horrid sites written in Microsoft tech, one only needs to look at Microsoft's own site and Office365 online.
It's a free-for-all out there, and the web development community is in free-fall. 
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Option 1:
Marc Clifton wrote: and the web development community is in free-fall.
without parachutes
Option 2:
Marc Clifton wrote: and the web development community is in free-fallfail.
FTFY
Choose one 
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Marc Clifton wrote: It's a free-for-all out there, and the web development community is in free-fall
Years ago I was basically being moved away from a traditional desktop client/server app developer role into a web dev role. Then a few months ago I told my boss I had to go back to something I'm more familiar with because--I told him bluntly--as a software developer, that's not what I had signed up for. Portfolio diversity be damned. It had come to a point where I dreaded getting up in the morning. It's not that I couldn't hack it, I just hated every aspect of it.
If I can make it to retirement without ever having to do web development...I'll be happy. If I can't - I honestly would consider an early retirement. I just can't find the motivation for that crap.
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dandy72 wrote: If I can make it to retirement without ever having to do web development
<snicker> I made it, just.
Now looking at fiddling around with web design in my copious spare time, haven't touched any code in months.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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If there's one thing I won't be doing with my "spare time" once retired...it's web development. Unless it becomes a whole different ball of wax by then. However, based on its 20+ year history, I don't see it happening.
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I'm all in favour of ham-fisted, messy, badly-designed pages for people's personal sites (if a guy wants to have his say about something or just be a part of the Internet, he shouldn't have to study for three years to do so), but the slightest sign of unprofessionalism in site design for a company makes me not want to risk doing business with that company.
For me, not being willing or able to do a job well means not being willing or able to do a job well.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Unused space is a waste of screen real-estate.
I've been given a machine with a heavy graphics card, and at a high resolution half of my screen is often empty on most webpages. Most games use the space more wisely.
Also, I am a big fan of WinForms, and as someone already noticed, it scales horribly
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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