Geek Speak — HabitableZone

Geek Speak » in reply to Define "bells and whistles"

re: Define "bells and whistles"
TB — (archived)

BTW, I've noticed that badly cluttered pages are more often found at the Web sites of large corporations. Take Yahoo's front page, for example, which grew from a simple list of categories into something that looks like the Wednesday supermarket insert in a newspaper.

It's kind of weird. It's exactly the opposite of the evolution of computer word processing and graphics. When the Mac and other such engines first came out and suddenly graphics was easy, every damn document I saw had flowered borders and bizarre fonts (usually dozens of different ones per page). *

Eventually, people settled down and documents looked professional again. Not so for web sites. While we don't see as many of the "white letters on red background" abominations any more, most of them have so damn many whizbangs on them that it drives me nuts.

Current pet peeve: hotlinks on news stories (usually every tenth word) that pop up something in front of you when you just pass your cursor over it by accident. Replaces previous pet peeve of popup windows that follow you down the frigging screen as you scroll until you kill them with a hammer.

.

* I was one of them, probably. I loved computers. I came from a long history of having to go to typesetting shops to get little bits of type, and painfully paste them into some kind of final form to take to a professional printer. Now? Same job takes about fifteen minutes, and prints out in color right at your desk. Drafting was pen on vellum, with ghastly reworks if a few lines were out of place. CAD was a miracle. God, we have it good now.

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