[HN Gopher] Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you
___________________________________________________________________
Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 294 points
Date : 2025-01-05 01:54 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rachelbythebay.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rachelbythebay.com)
| swyx wrote:
| this is exactly the sort of idealistic post that appeals to HN
| and nobody else. i dont have a problem with that apart from when
| technologists try to take these "back to basics" stuff to shame
| the substacks and the company blogs out there that have to be
| more powered by economics than by personal passion.
|
| its -obvious- things are mostly "better"/can be less "annoying"
| when money/resources are not a concern. i too would like to spend
| all my time in a world with no scarcity.
|
| the engineering challenge is finding alignments where "better for
| reader" overlaps with "better for writer" - as google did with
| doubleclick back in the day.
| imoreno wrote:
| To me, it seems like basically everything on this page is both
| better for reader and better for writer. Which ones are not, in
| your opinion?
| lolinder wrote:
| All the tracking stuff is better for advertisers than going
| without, and most writers are paid by advertisers. So
| transitively it would be reasonable to say that tracking is
| good for writers and bad for readers.
| imoreno wrote:
| People oversell this tracking/advertising. It's not a
| goldmine for every site. For this blog, if she wanted to
| include analytics into her decision about what content to
| produce, does she really need super high resolution stuff
| like where people moved their mouse? Would she ever make a
| significant income from these "ads", or selling the data
| for possibly pennies?
|
| Besides, just google analytics or something like that
| wouldn't be that bad (I know the blog author would
| disagree). A lot of sites go nuts and have like 20
| different trackers that probably track the same things.
| People just tack stuff on, YAGNI be damned, that's a big
| part of the problem and it's a net drain on both parties.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| The author isn't trying to profit from the reader's attention;
| it's just a personal blog. An ad-based business would. Neither
| is right or wrong, but the latter is distinctly annoying.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Ad-based businesses are indeed wrong and immoral.
| StressedDev wrote:
| Ad-based businesses exist because a lot of people
| (including many on this forum) refuse to pay for anything.
| During the late 1990s/early 2000s, people hated paying for
| anything and demanded that everything on the Internet
| should be free. Well, that led to the vast surveillance
| machine which powers Google, Facebook, and every ad-tech
| business out there. They need surveillance because it lets
| them serve more relevant ads and more relevant ads make
| more money.
|
| The bottom line is if you hate ad-based businesses, start
| paying for things.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Yes, it's the individuals' fault. Google, FB, and the
| rest _need_ to spy on us! I feel just awful for those
| poor companies.
|
| No. If your business model requires you to do evil
| things, your business should not exist.
|
| Anyway, I do pay for services that provide value. I was a
| paying Kagi customer until recently, for example (not
| thrilled with the direction things are going there now
| though).
| Dweller1622 wrote:
| What is the direction that things are going at Kagi now?
| What were they before?
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| All the AI shit, plus this
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1gvcqua/psa_the
| _ka...
| Dweller1622 wrote:
| Product development disagreements are largely immaterial
| to me, though the discussion around their integrations
| with Yandex remind me of prior discussions around their
| integrations with Brave.
|
| Either way, thanks for sharing.
| wruza wrote:
| Does this work? Which paid platform doesn't eventually
| start showing ads to paid users?
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Pinboard is the obvious example that springs to mind.
| mft_ wrote:
| A personal take is that ad-based businesses exist because
| there's no secure widespread reliable approach for
| micropayments (yet?).
|
| The mean value of adverts on a page is in the order of a
| tiny fraction of a cent per reader, which is presumably
| enough for the businesses that continue to exist online.
| If it was possible to pay this amount directly instead,
| and have an ad-free experience, I suspect many would do
| so, as the cumulative amount would usually be negligible.
| Yet so far, no-one's figured it out.
|
| (I should mention, there are very strong reasons why it's
| difficult to figure out currently, but AIUI these are
| rooted in the current setup of global payments and risk
| management by credit card companies.)
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Netflix does $30B in revenue. Spotify over $10B. Steam
| estimated around $10B. Those are are services where
| anyone could figure out how to get the stuff for free
| with a few minutes of research. People pay when they
| perceive value.
|
| A better way to characterize what's happening is that
| there is a lot of material out there that no one would
| ever pay for, so those companies instead try to get
| people's attention and then sell it.
|
| Their bait never was and never will be worth anything.
| People aren't "paying with ads"; they're being baited
| into receiving malware, and a different group of people
| pay for that malware delivery.
| djeastm wrote:
| >They need surveillance because it lets them serve more
| relevant ads and more relevant ads make more money.
|
| Don't they have enough money?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| This actually appeals to everyone. There are words and people
| can read them. It literally just works. With zero friction.
| This is peak engineering. It's how the web is supposed to work.
| It is objectively better. For everyone. Everyone _except_
| advertisers.
|
| The only problem to be solved here is the fact advertisers are
| the ones paying the people who make web pages. They're the ones
| distorting the web into engagement maximizing content
| consumption platforms like television.
| fragmede wrote:
| The words are nice and all, but it's no
| https://ciechanow.ski/
| skydhash wrote:
| The nice thing about your example is that it works even in
| eww (emacs), and quite well (not the JS part, of course).
| jmathai wrote:
| Most people don't remember, and some have never experienced,
| the Internet before it became a money grab.
|
| I think a lot of people outside of HN would prefer that
| Internet way more than what we have now.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| The _Web_ has been a money grab since Netscape was went
| public in 1995.
|
| My first for pay project was enhancing a Gopher server in
| 1993.
| jmathai wrote:
| Some people making money on the Internet is a lot different
| than what the Internet has become today - and what I meant
| by money grab.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| You do remember the entire dot com boom and bust, the
| punch the monkey banner ads, X11 pop under ads, etc?
|
| Don't romanticize the early internet.
| StressedDev wrote:
| Substack's UI is fairly minimal and does not appear to have
| many anti-patterns. My only complaint is that it is not easy to
| see just the people I am subscribed to.
| ghssds wrote:
| Substack disable zooming on mobile and I hate it.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Really? I can still zoom in and out in the normal way on a
| Substack article on Safari and iOS.
|
| What did they disable exactly?
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I see the zoom-breaking on android. I also see the top
| and bottom dick bars, a newsletter popup on every
| article, and links opening in new windows.
| nayuki wrote:
| Substack fails on several points for me.
|
| On the first or second page view of any particular blog, the
| platform likes to greet you with a modal dialog to subscribe
| to the newsletter, and you have to find and click the "No
| thanks" text to continue.
|
| Once you're on a page with text content, the header bar
| disappears when you scroll downward but reappears when you
| scroll upward. I scroll a lot - in both directions - because
| I skim and jump around, not reading in a rigidly linear way.
| My scrolling behavior is perfectly fine on static/traditional
| pages. It interacts badly with Substack's "smart" header bar,
| whose animation constantly grabs my attention, and also it
| hides the text at the top of the page - which might be the
| very text I wanted to read if it wasn't being covered up by
| the "smart" header bar.
| bandrami wrote:
| Doesn't substack nag you to log in? That's a non-starter for
| me
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Is there a way to instruct browsers, when available, to just go
| right into reader mode? I wonder if when your page is so minimal
| like this one, you may as well just do that instead.
|
| Or I guess at that point, you just don't do styles?
|
| Of all the things some people don't do with their webpage, I'm
| the biggest fan of not doing visual complexity.
| Zacharias030 wrote:
| My iOS Safari has it. I turned it on for the NYT, because I
| wanted a dark theme and then turned it off again because I
| realized that I like what they do with their pages (still have
| an ad blocker turned on though, because subscribers still see
| tons of ads).
| nayuki wrote:
| I agree with pretty much everything on that page except:
|
| > Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you here / I don't
| use visitor IP addresses outside of a context of filtering abuse.
|
| This point bit me personally about 5 years ago. As I browsed HN
| at home, I found that links to her website would not load - I
| would get a connection timed out error. Sometimes I would
| bookmark those pages in the hopes of reading them later. By
| accident, I noticed that her website did load when I was using
| public Wi-Fi or visited other people's homes.
|
| I assumed it was some kind of network routing error, so I emailed
| my Canadian ISP to ask why I couldn't load her site at my home.
| They got back to me quickly and said that there were no
| networking problems, so go email the site operator instead. I
| contacted Rachel and she said - and this is my poor paraphrasing
| from memory - that the IP ban was something she intentionally
| implemented but I got caught as a false positive. She quickly
| unbanned my IP or some range containing me, and I never
| experienced any problems again. And no, I never did anything that
| would warrant a ban; I clicked on pages as a human user and never
| botted her site or anything like that, so I'm 100% sure that I
| was collateral damage for someone else's behavior.
|
| The situation I saw was a very rare one, where I'd observe
| different behaviors depending on which network I accessed her
| site from. Sure, I would occasionally see "verification" requests
| from megacorps like Google/CAPTCHA, banks, Cloudflare, etc. when
| I changed networks or countries, but I grew to expect that
| annoyance. I basically never see specific bans from small
| operators like her. I don't fault her for doing so, though, as I
| am aware of various forms of network and computer system abuse,
| and have implemented a few countermeasures in my work
| sporadically.
|
| > I don't force you to use SSL/TLS to connect here. Use it if you
| want, but if you can't, hey, that's fine, too.
|
| Agreed, but I would like HN users to submit the HTTPS version.
| I'm not doing this to virtue-signal or anything like that. I'm
| telling you, a number of years ago when going through Atlanta
| airport, I used their Wi-Fi and clicked on a bunch of HN links,
| and the pages that were delivered over unsecured HTTP got
| rewritten with injections of the ISP's ads. This is not funny and
| we should proactively prevent that by making the HTTPS URL be the
| default one that we share. (I'm not against her providing an HTTP
| version.)
|
| As for everything else, I am so glad that her web pages don't
| have fixed top bars, the bloody simulated progress bar (I like my
| browser's scrollbar very much thank you), ample visual space
| wasted for ads (most mainstream news sites are guilty), space
| wasted mid-page to "sign up to my email newsletter", modal dialog
| boxes (usually also to sign up to newsletter), etc.
| o11c wrote:
| > use the HTTPS version
|
| It's probably reasonable to use HSTS to force https-aware
| browsers to upgrade and avoid injection of all the things she
| hates. Dumb browsers like `netcat` are not harmed by this at
| all. But even then ... why aren't you using `curl` or
| something?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > It's probably reasonable to use HSTS to force https-aware
| browsers to upgrade and avoid injection of all the things she
| hates.
|
| There's a broad spectrum between a browser that is "aware" of
| https and a browser that has all the cipher suites,
| certificates, etc to load a given page.
| StressedDev wrote:
| If a browser does not support modern TLS (SSL), it probably
| also has unpatched security flaws. Unpatched browsers
| should never be used on the Internet because they will get
| hacked.
| Spivak wrote:
| Sure but as a server operator, who cares? I already have
| zero trust in the client and it's not my job to punish
| the user for not being secure enough. If they get pwned,
| that's their problem.
|
| Unless I'm at work where there's compliance checkboxes to
| disallow old SSL versions I'll take whatever you have.
| FragenAntworten wrote:
| > As I browsed HN at home, I found that links to her website
| would not load
|
| Thanks for mentioning this, because I was having the same issue
| and I was surprised no one was mentioning that the site was
| (appeared to be) down. Switching to using a VPN made the post
| available to me.
| hackingonempty wrote:
| > I don't keep a "dick bar" that sticks to the top of the page to
| remind you which site you're on.
|
| I use an extension called "Bar Breaker" that hides these when you
| scroll away from the top/bottom of the page.[0] More people
| should know about it.
|
| [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bar-breaker/
| xp84 wrote:
| Nice. This may be my pet peeve on the modern internet. Nearly
| EVERY site has a dick bar, and the reason I care is it breaks
| scrolling with spacebar, which is THE most comfortable way to
| read long content, it scrolls you a screen at a time. But a
| dickbar obscures the first 1 to...10? lines of the content, so
| you have to scroll back up. The only thing worse than the
| dickbar is the dickbar that appears and disappears depending on
| last direction scrolled, so that each move of the scrolling
| mechanism changes the viewport size. A pox on them all.
| nayuki wrote:
| > Nearly EVERY site has a dick bar, and the reason I care is
|
| that when reading on my laptop screen, it takes up valuable
| vertical space on a small display that is in landscape mode.
| I want to use my screen's real estate to read the freaking
| content, not look at your stupid branding bar.
|
| And I don't need any on-page assistance to jump back to the
| top of the page and/or find the navigation. I have a "Home"
| key on my keyboard and use it frequently.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| TBF, many people _don 't_ have that Home key. I agree with
| you, though - there should be a better solution. At the
| very least, just have an optional "Top of page" toolbar
| button in your browser.
| P-Nuts wrote:
| Ctrl+|
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| That's one option. On macOS, it's fn + Left. On Android,
| I'm not sure there's anything.
| robertoandred wrote:
| Note to web devs: use scroll-padding to fix this:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/scroll-
| padd...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| No.
|
| Just kill the fucking dickbar.
| resonious wrote:
| Dick bar often breaks hash links as well. You click a link
| that scrolls you to a section, but you can't see the first
| few lines of it.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| IIRC (as a fellow spacebar aficionado) position:fixed breaks
| spacebar scrolling but position:sticky generally doesn't.
| philsnow wrote:
| I often scroll with the space bar instead of more modern
| contrivances like arrow keys, scroll wheels, trackpoints, or
| trackpads. Sites with these header bars always seem to scroll
| the entire viewport y size instead of (y - bar_height), so
| after I hit space I have to up-arrow some number of times to
| see the next line of text that should be visible but is
| hidden under the bar.
| imoreno wrote:
| It's annoying that every time "they" come up with a new
| antipattern, "we" have to add yet another extension to the list
| of mandatory things for each browser. And it also promotes
| browser monopoly because extensions get ported slowly to non-
| mainstream browsers.
|
| It would be better to have a single extension like uBlock
| origin to handle the browser compatibility, and then release
| the countermeasures through that. In fact, ublock already has
| "Annoyances" lists for things like cookie banners, but I don't
| think it includes the dick bar unfortunately.
|
| Incidentally, these bars are always on sites where the navbar
| takes 10% vertical space, cookie banner (full width of course)
| takes another 30% at the bottom, their text is overspaced and
| oversized, the left/right margins are huge so the text is like
| 50% of the width... Don't these people ever look at their own
| site? With many of these, I'm so confused how anyone could look
| at it and say it's good to go.
| wilkystyle wrote:
| It's not a silver bullet, but I do the following with uBlock
| Origin:
|
| 1. JS disabled by default, only enabled on sites I choose
|
| 2. Filter to fix sites that mess with scrolling:
| ##html:style(scroll-behavior: auto !important;)
|
| 3. Filters for dick bars and other floating elements:
| ##*:matches-css(position:fixed) ##*:matches-
| css(position:sticky)
| teddyh wrote:
| _The president was very insistent that we show popup ads at
| six different points in time, until he got home and got six
| popup ads, and said, "You know what? Maybe just two popups."_
|
| -- Joel Spolsky, _What is the Work of Dogs in this Country?_
| (2001): <https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/05/05/what-is-
| the-work-o...>
| threefour wrote:
| The OP blames "various idiot web 'designers'" for problems,
| but in my 30 years of being a web designer I have yet to
| meet one designer that wants to cause these problems. It's
| usually people responsible for generating revenue.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| In my career of roughly half as long, I have met plenty.
| Although it's also true that it's often people higher up
| who are amused by design gimmicks.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The web designers and developers are at the very least
| complicit. They are ultimately the ones typing in the
| code and hitting submit, so they at least must _share_
| the blame.
| wruza wrote:
| Extensions are already there: ubo, stylebot. We just have to
| invent a way to share user-rule snippets across these. There
| will always be a gray zone between trusted adblock lists
| included by default and some preferential things.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| I am usually the first old man to yell at any cloud, and I was
| overjoyed when someone invented the word "enshittening" for me
| to describe how the internet has gotten, but it surprised me a
| bit that people found that one annoying. I can see the problem
| of it sticking the top of the page with a logo (which is
| basically an ad and I hate those), but they usually have a menu
| there, so I always thought of them a bit like the toolbar at
| the top of an application window in a native desktop
| application. FWIW when I've built those, I've always de-
| emphasized the branding and focused on making the menus obvious
| and accessible.
|
| I'm happy to learn something new about other people's
| preferences, though. If people prefer scrolling to the top, so
| be it!
|
| EDIT: It occurs to me that this could be a preference setting.
| A few of the websites that have let me have my way, I've
| started generating CSS from a Django template and adding
| configuration options to let users set variables like colors--
| with really positive feedback from disabled users. At a
| fundamental level, I think the solution to accessibility is
| often configurability, because people with different
| disabilities often need different, mutually incompatible
| accommodations.
| kalensh wrote:
| Another thing to check for with sticky headers is how it
| behaves when the page is zoomed. Often, the header increased
| in size proportionately, which can shrink down the effective
| reading area quite a bit. Add in the frequent sticky chat
| button at the bottom, and users may be left with not a lot of
| screen to read text in.
|
| There can be a logic to keeping the header at the top like a
| menu bar, and I applaud you if you take an approach that
| focuses on value to the user. Though I'd still say most sites
| that use this approach, don't have a strong need for it, nor
| do they consider smaller viewports except for portrait
| mobile.
|
| Configuration is great, though it quickly runs into
| discoverability issues. However it is the only way to solve
| some things - like you pointed out with colors. I know people
| who rely on high contrast colors and others that reduce
| contrast as much as they effectively can.
| st-keller wrote:
| This is exactly what CSS was designed for: allowing you to
| define your personal style preferences in your browser,
| applying them across all websites. The term 'cascading'
| reflects this purpose.
|
| Unfortunately, the web today has strayed far from its
| original vision. Yet, we continue to rely on the foundational
| technologies that were created for that very vision.
| ryandrake wrote:
| IMO browsers are broadly dropping the ball and failing to
| be "the user's agent." Instead they are the agents of web
| developers, giving _them_ the powers that users should
| have.
|
| If browsers catered to their user's desires more than they
| cater to developers, the web wouldn't be so shitty.
| aembleton wrote:
| I just toggle reader mode. Gets rid of this and everything else
| annoying. For sites where that doesn't work, I zap the bar in
| uBO.
| niutech wrote:
| Brave has an excellent Speedreader mode.
| imoreno wrote:
| I agree with most of this. If every website followed these, the
| web would be heaven (again)...
|
| But why this one?
|
| >I don't force you to use SSL/TLS to connect here. Use it if you
| want, but if you can't, hey, that's fine, too.
|
| What is wrong with redirecting 80 to 443 in today's world?
|
| Security wise, I know that something innocuous like a personal
| blog is not very sensitive, so encrypting that traffic is not
| that important. But as a matter of security policy, why not just
| encrypt everything? Once upon a time you might have cared about
| the extra CPU load from TLS, but nowadays it seems trivial.
| Encrypting everything arguably helps protect the secure stuff
| too, as it widens the attacker's search space.
|
| These days, browser are moving towards treating HTTP as a bug and
| throw up annoying propaganda warnings about it. Just redirecting
| seems like the less annoying option.
| kdmtctl wrote:
| It's fine on a simple site. But lack of SSL/TLS also
| effectively disables http2 which is a performance hit, not just
| a security concern.
| drpixie wrote:
| >>I don't force you to use SSL/TLS to connect here. Use it if
| you want, but if you can't, hey, that's fine, too.
|
| She accepts http AND https requests. So it's your choice, you
| want to know who you're talking to, or you want speed :)
| nayuki wrote:
| When you force TLS/HTTPS, you are committing both yourself
| (server) and the reader (client) to a perpetual treadmill of
| upgrades (a.k.a. churn). This isn't a value judgement, it is a
| fact; it is a positive statement, not a normative statement.
| Roughly speaking, the server and client softwares need to be
| within say, 5 years of each other, maybe 10 years at maximum -
| or else they are not compatible.
|
| For both sides, you need to continually agree on root
| certificates (think of how the ISRG had to gradually introduce
| itself to the world - first through cross-signing, then as a
| root), protocol versions (e.g. TLSv1.3), and cipher suites.
|
| For the server operator specifically, you need to find a
| certificate authority that works for you and then continually
| issue new certificates before the old one expires. You might
| need to deal with ordering a revocation in rare cases.
|
| I can think of a few reasons for supporting unsecured HTTP:
| People using old browsers on old computers/phones (say Android
| 4 from 10 years ago), extremely outdated computers that might
| be controlling industrial equipment with long upgrade cycles,
| simple HTTP implementations for hobbyists and people looking to
| reimplement systems from scratch.
|
| I haven't formed a strong opinion on whether HTTPS-only is the
| way to go or dual HTTP/HTTPS is an acceptable practice, so I
| don't really make recommendations on what other people should
| do.
|
| For my own work, I use HTTPS only because exposing my services
| to needless vulnerabilities is dumb. But I understand if other
| people have other considerations and weightings.
| imoreno wrote:
| >the server and client softwares need to be within say, 5
| years of each other, maybe 10 years at maximum
|
| That's a fair point. HTTP changes more slowly. Makes sense
| for sites where you're aiming for longevity.
| lstamour wrote:
| Except it's not actually true.
| https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/clients.html highlights
| that many clients support standard SSL features without
| having to update to fix bugs. How much SSL you choose to
| allow and what configurations is between you and your... I
| dunno, PCI-DSS auditor or something.
|
| I'm not saying SSL isn't complicated, it absolutely is. And
| building on top of it for newer HTTP standards has its pros
| and cons. Arguably though, a "simple" checkbox is all you
| would need to support multiple types of SSL with a CDN.
| Picking how much security you need is then left to an
| exercise to the reader.
|
| ... that said, is weak SSL better than "no SSL"? The lock
| icon appearing on older clients that aren't up to date is
| misleading, but then many older clients didn't mark non-SSL
| pages as insecure either, so there are tradeoffs either
| way. But enabling SSL by default doesn't have to exclude
| clients necessarily. As long as they can set the time
| correctly on the client, of course.
|
| I've intentionally not mentioned expiring root CAs, as
| that's definitely an inherent problem to the design of SSL
| and requires system or browser patching to fix. Likewise
| https://github.com/cabforum/servercert/pull/553 highlights
| that some browsers are very much encouraging frequent
| expiry and renewal of SSL certificates, but that's a system
| administration problem, not technically a client or server
| version problem.
|
| As an end user who tries to stay up to date, I've just
| downloaded recent copies of Firefox on older devices to get
| an updated list of SSL certificates.
|
| My problem with older devices tends to be poor
| compatibility with IPv6 (an addon in XP SP2/SP3 not enabled
| by default), and that web developers tend to use very
| modern CSS and web graphics that aren't supported on legacy
| clients. On top of that, you've HTML5 form elements, what
| displays when responsive layouts aren't available (how big
| is the font?), etc.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of backwards
| compatibility but it's a lot more work for website authors
| to test pages in older or obscure browsers and fix the
| issues they see. Likewise, with SSL you can test on a
| legacy system to see how it works or run Qualys SSL
| checker, for example. Browsers maintain forwards-
| compatibilty but only to a point (see ActiveX, Flash in
| some contexts, Java in many places, the <blink> tag,
| framesets, etc.)
|
| So ultimately compatibility is a choice authors make based
| on how much time they put into testing for it. It is not a
| given, even if you use a subset of features. Try using
| Unicode on an early browser, for example. I still remember
| the rails snowman trick to get IE to behave correctly.
| bigs wrote:
| Why should web browsers treat http like a bug? Many sites don't
| need https.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Many sites don't need https.
|
| _Maybe_ intranet sites. Everything else absolutely should.
|
| https://doesmysiteneedhttps.com/
| muppetman wrote:
| Those are some of the most pedantic grasping at straws
| reasons I've ever read. It's like they know there's nothing
| wrong with http so they've had to invent worst case
| nightmare scenarios to make their "It's so important"
| reasons stick. Https is great. I use it. That website is
| pathetic though.
| fractallyte wrote:
| The source footer ("View Page Source") summarizes it
| perfectly:
|
| _Sites that need HTTPS: - all of them
|
| If you like it, you better put a lock on it._
|
| And, BTW, the website is as delightfully simple and
| unobtrusive as the one in the article.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| ISPs injecting ads into HTTP websites isn't a weird edge
| case. I've seen it happen.
| 542458 wrote:
| I used to have an ISP that would inject ads into HTTP sites.
| Every site needs HTTPS.
| tehjoker wrote:
| this is the statement of someone who wasn't around in 2013
| when the snowden leaks happened and google's datacenters got
| owned. everyone switched to https shortly thereafter
| einpoklum wrote:
| Didn't everyone switch to TOR shortly after? :-(
| criddell wrote:
| Every connection should be encrypted.
|
| Unencrypted connections can be weaponized by things like
| China's Great Canon.
| throwaway58670 wrote:
| Some old-enough browsers don't support SSL. At all.
|
| Also, something I often see non-technical people fall victim to
| is that if your clock is off, the entirety of the secure web is
| inaccessible to you. Why should a blog (as opposed to say
| online banking) break for this reason?
| Gud wrote:
| How old are these browsers and why should I let them online?
| Must be decades old.
| niutech wrote:
| Android versions prior to 4.4 support only TLS 1.0 which is
| deprecated and many old devices aren't upgradable. The same
| for Mobile IE 10.
|
| IE 10 in Windows Server 2008 doesn't support TLS 1.1+ by
| default.
| dusted wrote:
| My first impulse is to scream obscenities at you because I've
| seen this argument so many times repeated that I tend just keep
| quiet.. I don't think you can't understand, but I think you
| refuse to.
|
| You're basically saying "oh, _YOUR_ usecase is wrong, so let's
| take this away from everybody because it's dangerous sometimes"
|
| But yeah, I have many machines which would work just fine
| online except they can't talk to the servers anymore due to the
| newer algorithms being unavailable for the latest versions of
| their browsers (which DO support img tags, gifs and even pngs)
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Everyone using HTTPS protects everyone. Having some operators
| choose to not migrate to HTTPS-only websites makes the web less
| secure by increasing the surface area of attacks on users.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| I think many of these are just design trends. As in, I think in a
| lot of cases web designers will add these "features" not for a
| deeply considered reason, but simply because that's the thing
| everyone else seems to be doing.
|
| I've had to be pretty firm in the past with marketing teams that
| want to embark on a rebrand, and say however the design looks, it
| can't include modal windows or animated carousels. And I think
| people think you're weird when you say that.
| raegis wrote:
| > I've had to be pretty firm in the past with marketing teams
| that want to embark on a rebrand, and say however the design
| looks, it can't include modal windows or animated carousels.
| And I think people think you're weird when you say that.
|
| Some small businesses create websites for branding only, and
| get their business exclusively offline. They just want to have
| a simple, static site to say "we exist, and we are
| professionals", so they are fine with the latest in web design.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| Right. What I'm suggesting is their simple static site should
| probably just show the content they want to show, rather than
| write extra code [and add additional complexity] which makes
| that content gratuitously slide around the screen.
| modzu wrote:
| thank you
| frogulis wrote:
| > I don't pretend that posts are evergreen by hiding their dates.
|
| I didn't realise that hiding dates for the illusion of evergreen-
| ness was a desirable thing!
|
| On my personal site I added dates to existing pages long after
| they were uploaded for the very reason I wanted it to be plenty
| clear that they were thoughts from a specific time.
|
| For example, a bloggish post I wrote where, while I still think
| it's right, it now sounds like linkedin wank. I'm very happy for
| that one to be obviously several years old.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Supposedly it's an SEO thing. The theory is that Google is
| biased towards novelty and so penalises older articles
| (although I'm not sure how removing the date would help because
| surely Google would still know how long the article has been
| online for.)
|
| I have no idea how true that is but I remember hearing SEO
| folks talk about it a few years back.
| AHTERIX5000 wrote:
| Some content mills seem to display a date but automatically
| update it periodically. Sometimes you can outright see it
| can't be correct since the information is woefully out of
| date or you can check from Internet Archive that the content
| is the same as before but with a bumped date.
| dheera wrote:
| > I don't do popups anywhere. You won't see something that
| interrupts your reading to ask you to "subscribe" and to give up
| your e-mail address.
|
| Every time I get hit with a popup by a site I usually just leave.
| Sometimes with a cart full of items not yet paid for. It's
| astounding that they haven't yet learned that this is actually
| costing them business. Never interrupt your customers.
|
| Same goes for stores. If I walk into your store to browse and you
| accost me with "Can I help you" I'll be looking for an exit ASAP.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| > Sometimes with a cart full of items not yet paid for.
|
| And then a week later you'll get an email "Did you forget to
| buy all those products we're sure you want?..."
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Yet unlike the 20+ other websites that I can just copy the main
| url into NetNewsWire, it doesn't seem to have an RSS feed...
| skydhash wrote:
| This particular button is quite visible on the webpage
| scarface_74 wrote:
| With NetNewsWire even when you go to URL from the link
|
| https://imgur.com/a/DkifnBG
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Other posters mentioned her IP block - I wouldn't be
| surprised if that was the cause since automated netnewswire
| traffic might easily be confused with abuse.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| <https://rachelbythebay.com/w/feed/>
|
| (Under the RSS icon.)
| StressedDev wrote:
| Perhaps you should either file a bug with NetNewsWire, or debug
| NetNewsWire and submit a PR so it works with her blog.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| So we are now going back to special casing websites that
| don't follow standards like the IE6 days?
| munch117 wrote:
| Do you need special-casing to recognise
| <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml"
| href="/w/atom.xml"> ?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Using the link given from the website
|
| https://imgur.com/a/DkifnBG
| munch117 wrote:
| The w3.org validator says that
| https://rachelbythebay.com/w/atom.xml is a valid Atom 1.0
| feed (https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3
| A%2F%2Fra...).
|
| It does seem like something's off about the feed. Vienna
| can read the file, but it comes up empty. But it doesn't
| seem like the problem is standards non-compliance.
| tedunangst wrote:
| http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/12/10/feed/
| albert_e wrote:
| They did not mention --
|
| Text littered with hyperlinks on every sentence. Hyperlinks that
| do on-hover gimmicks like load previews or charts. Emojis or
| other distracting graphics (like stock ticker symbols and price
| indicators GOOG +7%) littered among the text.
|
| Backgrounds and images that change with scrolling.
|
| Popups asking to allow the website to send you notifications.
|
| Page footers that are two pages high with 200 links.
|
| Fine print and copyright legalese.
|
| Cookie policy banners that have multiple confusing options and
| list of 1000 affiliate third parties.
|
| Traditional banner and text ads.
|
| Many other dark patterns.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Hyperlinks that do on-hover gimmicks like load previews or
| charts.
|
| I haven't seen one that shows charts, but I gotta admit, I miss
| the hover preview when not reading wikipedia.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Something else that should absolutely be a browser-native
| feature rather than one each site has to optionally invent
| poorly and/or inconsistently.
| albert_e wrote:
| Agreed, as long as it can be turned off by user on the
| browser, and doing so does not break the site / ux.
| niutech wrote:
| Blink-based browsers have a built-in link preview in a
| popup which you can turn on.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| It's native in Safari
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Another: "Related" interstitial elements scattered within an
| article.
|
| Fucking NPR now has ~2--6 "Related" links _between paragraphs
| of a story_. I frequently read the site via w3m, and yes, will
| load the rendered buffer in vim ( <esc>-e) to delete those when
| reading an article.
|
| I don't know if it's oversensitisation or progressive cognitive
| decline, but even quite modest distracting cruft is
| increasingly intolerable.
|
| If you _truly_ have related stories, pile them at the end of
| the article, and put in some goddamned microcontent (title,
| description, publication date) for the article.
|
| As I've mentioned previously, my "cnn-sanify" script which
| strips story links and headlines from CNN's own "lite" page,
| and restructures those into section-organised, time-sorted
| presentation. Mostly for reading from the shell, though I can
| dump the rendered file locally and read it in a GUI browser as
| well.
|
| See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535359>
|
| My biggest disappointment: CNN's article selection is pretty
| poor. I'd recently checked against 719 stories collected since
| ~18 December 2024, and of the 111 "US" stories, 54% are
| relatively mundane crime. Substantive stories are the
| exception.
|
| (The sense that few of the headlines really _were_ significant
| was a large part of why I 'd written the organisation script in
| the first place.)
| nayuki wrote:
| > put in some goddamned microcontent (title, description,
| publication date) for the article
|
| Do you mean metadata?
| rchaud wrote:
| > Text littered with hyperlinks on every sentence.
|
| This is the biggest hassle associated with reading articles
| online. I'm never going to click on those links because:
|
| - the linked anchor text says nothing about the website it's
| linking to - the link shows a 404 (common with articles 2+
| years old) - the link is probably paywalled
|
| Very annoying that article writing guidelines are unchanges
| from the 2000s where linkrot and paywalls were almost unheard
| of.
| ericrallen wrote:
| I really appreciate hyperlinks that serve as citations, like
| "here's some prior art to back up what I'm saying," or that
| explain some joke, reference, jargon, etc. that the reader
| might not be familiar with, but unfortunately a lot of sites
| don't use them that way.
| joshdavham wrote:
| > Safari recently gained the ability to "hide distracting items"
|
| I just looked into this feature and it looks awesome! Is there a
| way to do this in chrome? If not, are there any available chrome
| extensions that do this?
| wruza wrote:
| Is there a way to do anything in chrome now? It became your
| personal google port and will soon disable any content-
| modification for the sake of your adsecurity and prinvadcy.
| wruza wrote:
| _I don 't keep a "dick bar" that sticks to the top of the page to
| remind you which site you're on. Your browser is already doing
| that for you._
|
| A variation of this is my worst offender, the flapping bar. Not
| only it takes space, it flaps every time I adjust my overscroll
| by pulling back, _and_ it covers the text I was trying to adjust.
| The hysteresis to hide it back is usually too big and that makes
| you potentially overscroll again.
|
| Special place in hell for those who hide the flap on scroll-up
| but show it again when the scroll inertia ends, without even
| pulling back.
|
| Can't say here what I think about people who do the above, but
| you can imagine.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Funnily enough for years I would say the general consensus on
| HN was that it was a thoughtful alternative to having to scroll
| back to the top, esp back when it was a relatively new gimmick
| on mobile.
|
| I remember arguing about it on HN back when I was in uni.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Most mobile browsers lack a "home" key equivalent (or bury it
| in a not-always-visible on-screen soft-keyboard). That's
| among the very few arguments in favour of a "Top" navigation
| affordance.
|
| I still hate such things, especially when using a desktop
| browser.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I think some, if not most, mobile browsers - even apps -
| used to implement it via a space near the top of the
| window/screen. That seems to have gone away, though.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Worse: "pull to refresh" means that often when you try to
| scroll to the top of a page ... it reloads instead.
|
| The number of times this has happened whilst I've been
| editing a post on some rando site, losing my content ...
| wruza wrote:
| It works since forever on ios in most (native) apps,
| including the browser. Tap on the "clock" to scroll up -
| that _is_ the home button. In safari you might need to
| tap again, if the header was collapsed.
| cr125rider wrote:
| Double tap the top bar and almost all scrolling panels on
| iOS will whoosh to the top
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| This is definitely an Android failing, in that case.
| wruza wrote:
| It can actually be done correctly, like e.g. safari does it
| in the top-urlbar mode.
|
| - When a user scrolls content-up in any way, the header
| collapses immediately (or you may just hide it).
|
| - When a user scrolls content-down by _pulling_ , without "a
| kick", then it _stays_ collapsed.
|
| - When a user "kick"-scrolls content-down, i.e. scrolls
| carelessly, in a way that a when finger lifts, scroll still
| has inertia -- _then_ it gets shown again. Maybe with a short
| activation distance or inertia level to prevent ghost kicks.
|
| As a result, adjusting text by pulling (including repeatedly)
| won't flap anything, and if a user kick-scrolls, then they
| can access the header, if it has any function to it. It sort
| of separates content-down scroll into two different gestures,
| which you just learn and use appropriately.
|
| But instead most sites implement the most clinical behavior
| as described in the comment above. If a site does that, it
| should be immediately revoked a dns record and its owner put
| on probation, at the legislative level.
| ValdikSS wrote:
| The page is so narrow, like it's made for a vertical smartphone
| screen. That's ANNOYING!
| nayuki wrote:
| Look up any typographic manual and you'll learn that you can't
| make lines of text too wide or else people will have trouble
| reading them. Example - https://practicaltypography.com/line-
| length.html .
|
| This is also related to why professional newspapers and
| magazines lay out text in relatively narrow columns, because
| they are easy to scan just top-down while hardly moving your
| eyes left-right.
|
| I do think that vertical phones are too narrow for conveying
| decent text, but you also can't have completely unbounded page
| widths because people do run browsers maximized on desktop 4K
| screens.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That's true, but 60 characters is way toward the "too narrow"
| side of the scale. I'd fatten the page to ~45--55 em (or
| rem), and BTW, strongly prefer _relative font-sized units_ to
| pixels, which ... are increasingly unreliable as size
| determinants, particularly as high-def, high-dot-pitch
| displays on monitors, smartphones, and e-ink displays become
| more common. Toto we 're not in 96 dpi land any more.
|
| I also strongly prefer at least _some_ padding around the
| edges of pages / text regions, with 5--10% usually much
| easier to read.
|
| I'd played with making those changes on Rachel's page through
| Firefox's inspector: html { font-family:
| garamond, times, serif; } body { max-width: 50em; }
| .post { padding 2em 4em; }
|
| To my eye that improves things greatly.
|
| (I generally prefer serif to sans fonts, FWIW.)
| chuckadams wrote:
| > Toto we're not in 96 dpi land any more.
|
| Unless you're banging directly on the framebuffer, logical
| pixels haven't been tied to device pixels for literally
| decades. CSS specifies pixels at 1/96 of an inch, a
| decision that goes all the way back to X11. 1rem == 16px,
| though this can be changed in CSS (just set font-size on
| the :root element) whereas you can typically only change
| pixel scaling in your display settings.
|
| So yes, using rems is better, but pixels are not going to
| get dramatically smaller on denser displays unless the
| device is deliberately scaling them down (which phones
| often do simply because they're designed to be read up-
| close anyway)
| rchaud wrote:
| Well, that site also has this:
| https://practicaltypography.com/columns.html
|
| The style of the page can use CSS column properties to make
| use of the width of laptop/tablet displays, instead of
| defaulting to ugly "mobile size fits all" templates.
| ryandrake wrote:
| That research may be true, but the layout of the page should
| be up to the user, not imposed by the developer. If I want my
| browser to display a web page using the entire maximized 4K
| browser window, that should be something 1. I can easily
| configure and 2. web developers respect, no matter what the
| "typographic researchers" think.
| djeastm wrote:
| You might be more sophisticated than the average reader.
| Less sophisticated readers will just navigate away instead
| of messing with settings they don't understand.
| sircastor wrote:
| Over the last year I've gotten a couple of offers from PCB
| manufactures to make my projects in exchange for a review and
| visibility in my projects and on my site. It was tempting, but
| every time I thought about doing it, it felt off.
|
| I really like writing to readers and not obligating them to
| anything else. No sales push, no ads, no sign ups. It's nice that
| it's just what I wanted to share.
| tasuki wrote:
| The one annoyance inflicted is the pointless container-for-
| everything with rounded corners. It makes the web page optically
| smaller on mobile and seems to serve no purpose.
|
| Just extend the background to the very corners like hacker news
| does!
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Such a good list, I may have to copy it for my own site and stuff
| it somewhere as a "colophon" of sorts. Maybe this kind of thing
| should even be a machine-readable standard...
|
| Rachel, I'm curious as to your mentions of 'old posts' that may
| not be compliant, e.g. missing an alt attribute - is this
| something you've considered scanning your html files for and
| fixing?
| lenkite wrote:
| actually bookmarked since Rachel has mentioned several annoyances
| that it is easy to accidentally include even if you have the best
| of intentions. Wish she gave this in checklist and categorized
| form instead of long-text.
|
| LOL'ed at "dick bar" - seriously that thing is so annoying.
| ajb wrote:
| It's amazing to me what people tolerate, just because it doesn't
| seem like a human is doing it to us. If a door-to-door salesman
| was told to do the equivalent of this stuff, they'd be worried
| about being punched in the face.
| wruza wrote:
| The logic here is that it's you who come to visit, not them.
| But the next issue is that everyone agrees it's not normal for
| a private service either, even if it's free, and it should be
| disallowed. But laws don't work like that. We simply have no
| law systems that could manage that, nowhere on this planet.
| nicbou wrote:
| Imagine if people understood consent the way the tech industry
| does.
| ryandrake wrote:
| If the world was a nightclub, the tech industry would be a
| creepy guy who goes up to everyone and says "You're now
| dating me. [Accept or Try Again Later]"
| rchaud wrote:
| While an interesting post because of the number of examples
| provided, this does read like somebody patting themselves on the
| back for building a website like it's 1995, when websites were
| not designed with the intention of making money or acting as a
| lead gen funnel.
|
| Let's have a look at the websites she's helped build at her job
| and see how many of those old web principles were applied.
| niutech wrote:
| You can make a profitable text-only website, e.g. Craigslist.
|
| But not everything on the web should be for profit.
| xnx wrote:
| Previously I've used the "disable styles" shortcut key in the
| Firefox web developer extension to make unfriendly websites more
| tolerable. Today, I wish Chrome had a shortcut key for enabling
| reader mode to do the same.
| joshka wrote:
| For the style of reading I normally do, this particular width is
| actively harmful to my reading comprehension. I would prefer just
| a bit wider text generally. This is something which the site does
| inflict on the reader. I agree that many sites are too wide in
| general, but this feels is too narrow by about 33% for my liking.
|
| Additionally the way that the background degrades to a border
| around the text when using dark reader also causes problems in a
| similar way (due to the interaction between jagged text and a
| strong vertical line.
|
| These are subtle points though, and I appreciate the many
| annoyances that are not there when reading Rachel's stuff.
| bshacklett wrote:
| > I don't do some half-assed horizontal "progress bar" as you
| scroll down the page. Your browser probably /already/ has one of
| those if it's graphical. It's called the scroll bar. (See also:
| no animations.)
|
| Sadly, I would argue that this is inaccurate. Especially on
| mobile browsers, the prevalence of visible scroll bars seems to
| have dropped off a cliff. I'll happily excuse the progress bar,
| especially because this one can be done without JavaScript.
| philsnow wrote:
| JS progress bars also generally show you your progress through
| the main-content div or whatever, so even if they have a
| particularly egregious footer (I've seen footers that are over
| 1000px tall, with embedded youtube videos), the progress
| through the actual content is still somewhat faithfully
| reported.
|
| Better would be to ditch the absurd footer, but still.
| winterbloom wrote:
| Disagree with a few of these
|
| There's nothing wrong with progress. Expecting a user to have a
| JavaScript enabled browser is reasonable
|
| You don't expect an online retailer to accept mailed-in cash, do
| you?
| cpill wrote:
| Gee, if only there were a search engine that penalised pages and
| down ranked them for any of these annoyances, especially
| advertising, so one could get results that didn't annoy you when
| you visited them. oh wait, that would be a Google killer... don't
| want to go there...
| alex1138 wrote:
| I genuinely can't tell if this is sarcasm but yeah Kagi aims to
| do that
| aflukasz wrote:
| Nice read.
|
| I wish there was one more paragraph though:
|
| "I don't use trailing slashes in article URLs. Blog post is a
| file, not an index of a directory, so why pretend otherwise?"
|
| But then it's http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/01/04/cruft/ , so
| I guess they don't agree.
| watersb wrote:
| Obligatory take on web design process from The Oatmeal:
|
| https://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell
|
| .
|
| I'm not affiliated with the Toast. But invoking this cartoon, I
| occasionally describe a web design as "Toasty".
| Terr_ wrote:
| [delayed]
| einpoklum wrote:
| > _I don 't do some half-assed horizontal "progress bar" as you
| scroll down the_ > _page. Your browser probably /already/ has one
| of those if it's graphical._ > _It 's called the scroll bar._
|
| ... unless you use GTK, and then it hides the scroll bar because
| it's sooo clever and wants to bestow a "clean" interface upon
| you. Yes, I'm looking at you Firefox.
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