InsaneJournal

Website Rant
Okay, I know I'm a snob.

I visited another personal website today and spent much time cringing. I realize that I'm an anal-retentive wanker and all that, and probably have a little OCD problem for all I know, but man! What is with these people who "create" (and I use that term loosely) a website to host their fanfiction, and don't even bother to make sure it looks decent?

I'm not even talking about the mismatched background images and shitty graphics littering the place, though those alone are grounds for the author/designer to be severely flogged. I'm talking about looking at a chapter and seeing two to three different font sizes where it should all be the same size, blockquotes chucked in where they have no business being, and italics, plus extra blank lines between paragraphs. (And on top of that, every single paragraph has a style specified. Talk about overkill.)

Do these people not give a flying fuck about aesthetics?

And what the hell is this thing with people using Microsoft Word as their editor? I look at the page source on some of these pages and want to cry! If a person can afford Office, why the hell aren't they spending the money for a real program? You know... Dreamweaver? Or something else that actually does things correctly? (Front Page is an abomination, of course, and should be banned throughout the world.) Or did Office come pre-installed or something on their shiny new piece of shit factory-made computer from HP or wherever?

It is not okay to write in Word and have it "convert" to HTML. It's evil! (For that matter, I doubt it's okay to "convert" from OpenOffice, but I've never tried.)

I know, I know, not everyone knows their way around HTML. Not everyone will take the time to actually learn it, to teach themselves, and then let a proper program do much of the work for them (you know, us people with the motto "Efficiency is intelligent laziness."). After all, who in their right mind would want to hand-code a complicated table? (Doesn't mean they shouldn't know how to, though.)

Ugh. Just... ugh.