Web page annoyances that I don’t inflict on you here
I’ve been thinking about things that annoy me about other web pages.
Safari recently gained the ability to “hide distracting items” and I’ve
been having great fun telling various idiot web “designers” to stuff it.
Reclaiming a simple experience free of wibbly wobbly stuff has been
great.
In doing this, I figured maybe I should tell people about the things I
don’t do here, so they realize how much they are “missing out” on.
I don’t force people to have Javascript to read my stuff. The simplest
text-based web browser going back about as far as you can imagine
should be able to render the content of the pages without any trouble.
This is because there’s no JS at all in these posts.
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.
The last two items mean you could probably read posts via telnet as long
as you were okay with skipping over all of the HTML
might notice that the text usually word-wraps around 72, so it’s not
that much of a stretch.
I don’t track “engagement” by running scripts in the post’s pages that
report back on how long someone’s looked at it… because, again, no JS.
I don’t set cookies. I also don’t send unique values for things like
Last-Modified or ETag which also could be used to identify individuals.
You can compare the values you get with others and confirm they are the
same.
I don’t use visitor IP addresses outside of a context of filtering
abuse.
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.
I don’t do animations outside of one place. Exactly one post has
something in it which does some graphical crap that changes by itself.
It’s way back in July 2011, and it’s in a story ABOUT animating a
display to show the absence of a value. It doesn’t try to grab your
attention or mislead you, and it’s not selling anything.
I don’t use autoplaying video or audio. There are a couple of posts
where you can click on your browser’s standard controls to start
playback of a bit of audio that’s related to the post. Those are also
not used to grab your attention, mislead you, or sell something.
I don’t try to “grab you” when you back out of a page to say “before you
go, check out this other thing”. The same applies to closing the window
or tab: you won’t get this “are you sure?” crap. If you want out, you
get out *the first time*.
I don’t pretend that posts are evergreen by hiding their dates.
Everything has a clear date both in the header of the page and built
into the URL. If it’s out of date, it’ll be pretty obvious.
I don’t put crap in the pages which “follows you” down the page as you
scroll. You want to see my header again? Cool, you can scroll back up
to it if it’s a particularly long post. 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.
There are no floating buttons saying things like “contact me” or “pay
me” or “check out this service I totally didn’t just write this post to
hawk on the red or orange sites”. I don’t put diagonal banner things
across the corners. I don’t blur it out and force you to click on
something to keep going. TL;DR I don’t cover up the content, period.
I don’t mess with the scrolling of the page in your browser. You won’t
get some half-assed attempt at “smoothing” from anything I’ve done. You
won’t get yanked back up to the top just because you switched tabs and
came back later.
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.)
I don’t litter the page with icons that claim to be for “sharing” or
“liking” a post but which frequently are used to phone home to the
mothership for a given service to report that someone (i.e., YOU) has
looked at a particular page somewhere. The one icon you will find on
all posts links to the “how-to” page for subscribing to my Atom feed,
and that comes from here and phones home to nobody.
I don’t use “invisible icons” or other tracker crap. You won’t find
evil 1x1s or things of that nature. Nobody’s being pinged when you
load one of these posts.
I don’t load the page in parts as you scroll it. It loads once and then
you have it. If you get disconnected after that point, you can still
read the whole thing. There’s nothing more to be done.
I don’t add images without ALTs and/or accompanying text in the post
which aims to describe what’s going on for the sake of those who can’t
get at the image for whatever reason (and there are a great many).
(Full disclosure: I wasn’t always so good at writing the descriptions,
and old posts that haven’t been fixed yet are hit or miss.)
I don’t do nefarious things to “outgoing links” to report back on which
ones have been clicked on by visitors. A link to example.com is just
blah blah blah with no funny stuff
added. There are no ?tracking_args added or other such nonsense, and I
strip them off if I find them on something I want to use here. If you
click on a link, that’s between you and your browser, and I’m none the
wiser. I really don’t want to know, anyway. I also don’t mess with
whether it opens in a tab or new window or whatever else.
I don’t redirect you through other sites and/or domains in order to
build some kind of “tracking” “dossier” on you. If you ask for
/w/2024/12/17/packets/, you get that handed to you directly. (And if
you leave off the trailing slash, you get a 301 back to that, because,
well, it’s a directory, and you really want the index page for it.)
I don’t put godawful vacuous and misleading clickbait “you may be
interested in…” boxes of the worst kind of crap on the Internet at the
bottom of my posts, or anywhere else for that matter.
My pages actually have a bottom, and it stays put. If you hit [END] or
scroll to the bottom, you see my footer and that’s it. It won’t try to
jam more crap in there to “keep you engaged”. That’s it. If you want
more stuff to read, that’s entirely up to you, and you can click around
to do exactly that.
I don’t make any money just because someone lands on one of my posts.
You won’t find ads being injected by random terrible companies. In
fact, keeping this stuff up and available costs me a chunk every
month (and always has). I sell the occasional book and get the
occasional “buy me a cup of tea or lunch” type of thing, and I do
appreciate those. (I tried doing paid watch-me-code “lessons” years
ago, but it really didn’t go anywhere, and it’s long gone now.)
I’m pretty sure everything that loads as part of one of my posts is
entirely sourced from the same origin – i.e.,
http[s]://rachelbythebay.com/ something or other. The handful of
images (like the feed icon or the bridge pic), sounds, the CSS, and
other things “inlined” in a post are not coming from anywhere else.
You aren’t “leaving tracks” with some kind of “trust me I’m a dolphin”
style third-party “CDN” service. You connect to me, ask for stuff, and
I provide it. Easy.
I say “pretty sure” on the last one because there are almost 1500 posts
now, and while my page generation stuff doesn’t even allow for an IMG
SRC that comes from another origin, there are some “raw” bits of HTML in
a few old weird posts that break the usual pattern. I don’t think I’ve
ever done an IMG or SOURCE or LINK from off-site in a raw block, though.
I don’t even WANT stuff coming from off-site, since it tends to break.
I find that I can really only rely on myself to keep URLs working over
time.
Phew! That’s all I can think of for the moment.
