You’re doing it wrong: pet peeves in Web authoring

I usually try to be fairly gentle in my blog posts. Well, this one’s a full-out rant. And it does name names, but only for purposes of demonstration, not public shaming.

By dint of what I do, I spend a lot of time working on the Web. Here are some of my pet peeves:

No links

People, it’s the Web. The very feature that makes it a Web rather than just electronic text is the existence of the hyperlink. Use it. Do not tell me where to find it. Do not tell me to google it. Google is not a replacement for the hyperlink. Just link me.

Here’s a blog post from an academic publisher that doesn’t use any links. The post is promoting a recently-published book with a remix contest. There are no links to the contest, to the book page, to online bookstores — nothing.

The contest is hosted on Facebook (a walled garden — another pet peeve). Here’s what the post says — I wish I was making this up:

We’re hosting the competition on their Facebook fan page. All you need to do is search for the event (Remix the Remixer) on Facebook …

Despite being a walled garden, it is possible to link to the event (although you’ll need to log in to access it). Did you seriously just tell me to search for it? And presumably this was written by the company’s PR department…?

Naked URLs

Related to the above are authors who give you the URL of the page they’re talking about, but just the URL — sometimes even without a link. Let me demonstrate:

Good:

Check out this cool search engine, Google!

Bad:

Check out this cool search engine, Google! http://www.google.com/

Worse:

Check out this cool search engine, Google! http://www.google.com/

No markup

Yeah, just paste a bunch of text into a Web page. Paragraph breaks, emphasis, citations — who needs that?

Ridiculous markup

I don’t even mean terrible design choices like grey text on a white background. I just mean straight up ridiculous markup. I assume this usually results from composing in a word processor and pasting into a Web page. For instance, every paragraph will be marked as class="MsoNormal" (a class which, of course, is never defined anywhere).

The UK PubMed Central Blog takes this a step further and marks up every word which is “misspelled”:

There’s no use for that; it’s just cruft.

And two faux pas

All of the above are errors for which I think there’s no real excuse. I’ll throw in two bonus pet peeves — I understand why people do them, but they still rub me the wrong way:

Content is not in the page

As in, “Check out this cool new document I wrote — here’s a PDF download.”

Anything that’s not (X)HTML isn’t as easy to use, copy, re-format, link to, etc. Moreover, it requires people to leave their browser (or at least to load a plugin).

I know why people do it: because it’s easier than preparing an (X)HTML version of the document (after already having made a PDF, Word document, or whatever). But it’s still irksome.

Deprecated / unsemantic markup

So you want to tell me about the book Moby Dick. Cool, let’s talk about it. But did you use the cite element — or did you use em or i?

If you used i (or span style="font-style: italic"), you told the computer that the text should be italic, but you didn’t say why. For anyone who wants to render the text in a way other than the one you intended (say, in audio), your markup doesn’t give the computer any useful information about what to do with it.

If you used em, you actually told the computer to emphasize the phrase “Moby Dick” — the same way you might emphasize Wow! or Awesome! Your markup is actually misleading now.

But if you used cite, you told the computer, “This is a citation to the title of work — render it as appropriate.” The standard way to do that in English is with italics, so unless you or the reader tells the computer to do otherwise, it’s rendered in italics.

I know why people do it wrong: we compose Web pages the way we’re used to composing text, where italics is italics. (Plus it’s just more tags to learn and remember to use.) But on the Web, rather than just making something italic, we can encode why, which gives more options to both the author and the user of how to render it, and makes it possible for computers to extract meaning from it.

I’m sure I’m not perfect when it comes to these and other Web-authoring rules of etiquette. (Plus, in email, I prefer top-posting or inline replies — gasp!) But I’m not trying to cast stones, just to call attention to problems — and, really, just to vent.