Writing

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 <tag> <crap>. You 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 <a href="http://example.com/">blah blah blah</a> 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.