Kirinji's Pad - (Articles - Websites ranting)

Okay, there's something which has been bothering me. This is mainly combined from thoughts after visiting certain websites and thoughts from other people I know in real life. This is more like a rant telling people what not to do on an website.

"This site is for only Internet Explorer 5 or above..."

Internet Explorer only sites. What is the point?. What you are simply doing is shooting yourself in the leg because you will lose web page hits from people who do not wish to use an Micro$oft Browser and this simply turns those visitors away. This also annoys me because it just shows to me that the site owner does not care at all.

"FrontPage is a really good website editing package and that it appears exactly as it does in the browser like in the editor..."

People who design sites using FrontPage. This is prehaps the badest thing you could do, FrontPage writes pages more specific to Internet Explorer and so when putting your page through the W3C HTML validator it will (more than likely) say that it is not an valid W3C HTML document. Vaild W3C HTML documents appear correctly in more browsers than non-valid ones. Learning to write your pages properly in Notepad/VI (Linux) is a more effective way to understanding HTML.

"Even though we're from the UK, we have decided to enforce the COPPA act on our site. Meaning children aged 13 or under may not register/join/post at our forums/gallery/oekaki board."

Website services which are on servers which are outside of America (USA) which use the COPPA act. For starters this is a act which for America (USA) NOT for any other country. So basically you're using an act which not even for your own country. No matter what you could say about the act, it is NOT applicable in your country (unless the server is in America (USA) then you have to). To be honest, If I did start using software which had parts of COPPA I would disable it or remove the parts of the software which has the COPPA in, since it is not applicable where I live. The part of a form which I find gets too personal is when they start asking my date of birth.

"Our broadcast is available in the Windows Media Format and also the RealMedia Format...."

Finally, Web streaming broadcasts, Windows Media Video/Audio and RealMedia Video/Audio (player specific formats) is a (in my book) BIG NO-NO. Windows Media Video/Audio files take a while to open on a slow computer with RealMedia Video/Audio being the worst offender of the two. MP3 is alright, but with the Vorbis OGG format slowly sweeping in (which uses less space than MP3 does, so uses less bandwith), MP3 will soon be an "old technology."