Since this is the Pit - fuckwankbollocksarsebiscuit.
There should be a rule for the internet - NO ROLLOVER BEHAVIOUR AT ALL!
It’s irritating when you move your mouse to click on something, and because you’ve moved slightly too far up, a stupid rollover menu obscures what you wanted to click on (which by the way is 0.00000000000000001 mm away from the rollover trigger area)
It’s irritating when you click on something, and by clicking on it you’ve FUCKING DONE THE OPPOSITE OF EXPECTED ONCLICK BEFUCKINGAVIOUR! When I click something I expect to have activated it, not for it to appear microseconds before I clicked and disappear on click. How am I supposed to know what’s a rollover and what isn’t. Should I go round hovering over the ‘buttons’ and then build a mental picture for every website of what I can click on (to get something to happen and what I shouldn’t click on (to get something to happen)
This is minor, but my excuse is that I have accumulated some pit-points from all the times I didn’t pit this behaviour.
My company website was this way. 5 menu items in the nav. Three produced a drop down menu. The other two you clicked on their main nav button. The three with the drop down menus produced nothing when clicking on their main nav button.
It was fucking embarrassing. One of the services we provide is web development.
It pissed me off so much I reprogrammed it (dumped the drop downs) and redesigned the flow of the entire website to compensate. Now it conforms to the 3 click rule (get the information you want within 3 clicks)
The sad thing is this site was created by one of our “professional” web developers. The code for the site was even worse. It took days to clean up. I also did the right thing by converting the site away from ColdFusion in favour of Php. ColdFusion is a pit entry all its own.
I don’t do web design for a living (I used to), It’s a sorry moment when your system admin has to fix your web designers code.
I got ‘given’ adobe web standard cs4 at work. It seems to have coldfusion (and something called spry) in it.
I didnt’ ask for it.
I haven’t used it.
I can’t see myself using it.
I’m happy to keep writing php and asp with a text editor.
But the guys in the IT dept keep pestering me to use dreamweaver to do my stuff.
One thing I am lacking with is CSS - the stuff to make things look nice (up to now I’ve been all about functionality but I am going to start learning CSS now too)
I’ve always been ant-4GL (“Fourth Generation Language”) apps. I don’t know how they can be called a language because there is often little or no coding in a launguage involved. I prefer having control over every letter of the code.
You don’t mean rollover menus, you mean dropdown menus. And they have nothing to do with Web 2.0, as they’ve been around several years before the whole ‘Web 2.0’ style/sensibility permeated site development and became a cliche. I like Web 2.0 – it’s a sensibility that encourages simplicity and clarity in design, and puts the site visitor in charge of his or her experience as much as possible.
But getting back to your original rant: you’re talking about poor design and inconsistency in menu interfaces, and those are big no-nos. I agree it’s frustrating. When I’m in charge of design (in addition to being a freelance designer, I create my own sites too), I do my best to avoid that; all menu items are clickable and lead to a page. Several menus do have dropdowns, since they’re great for organizing a lot of content, but the topmost menu items (‘triggers’) are clickable and navigable for those who have javascript turned off – or anyone who just prefers to click on the menu. The trick is to avoid ‘null links’, i.e., links that go nowhere and do nothing but trigger some script or effect.
Sometimes you get a client who really really wants things to behave a certain way, alas, and with such folks you just gotta bow to their will or, if your objection is particularly strong, give up the job. So I do have a few items in my portfolio that use the dreaded ‘null link’ menu navigation. But I ain’t happy about it, for the very reasons you enumerate in your OP. It’s just not user-friendly or logical, and it bugs.
You can always use a WYSIWYG tool to generate some thing or other, then crib the code - I used to do this sometimes for complex tables*, even though I did know how to do it longhand.
remembering of course that visual tools don’t necessarily always do things the best or right way.
We use Coldfusion at my work, and I’m primarily the interface person and not the backend coder, so I’ve just skimmed the surface of the language, but I wish we used PHP just for the community support. We keep on reinventing the wheel or having trouble integrating open source apps with our apps because the CF community is kinda dead. It’s horrible, if you google this one open source CF newsletter app almost all the results are our implementation of said app. Things would be so much easier if we could just implement Wordpress or phpBB or a bajillion other well-supported PHP apps into our apps instead.