A Critique of ASGossip
Well, we should have known it was coming. Our web site reviews yesterday invited all of you to send critiques of ASGossip. And they are just as harsh as our reviews. And it’s all true. Our site is not pretty. Maybe next time, eh?
- Yellow on black is so, so 1995.
- The authors are too lazy to learn RGB values, so they resort to text=yellow and link=magenta. Also note that most parameters don’t have quotation marks, as HTML specs call for.
- The so-called graphics look like they were done by a seventh-grader with too much time and a copy of dad’s 1992 version of Typestyler on her hands.
- The authors fail to recognize how hard aliased italics type reads on a computer screen.
- The body columns are relative, not absolute. A big no-no. Blockquote doth not adequate margins make. And that crappy-looking horizontal bar is wider than the screen. Another no-no.
- On some of the linked graphics, there is an extra space between the <img> tag and the </a>. On a browser with underlining turned on, this creates a little 3-pixel booger to the right of the graphic.
- The <title> tag is not nested within a <head> tag.
- Those are some of the ugliest, most worthless emoticons I have ever seen.
- There is nothing to unite section headers with their sections. For instance, on the Web site review page, there is an equal amount of space between the bottom of Bass’ review and Briggeman’s header and between Briggeman’s header and Briggeman’s text.
All in all, it’s one of the ugliest sites I’ve ever seen, and perhaps the ugliest site to ever offer up a critical review of the graphic design of others. (BTW, you forgot to flame Bass for using height= and width= to resize her mug shot, instead of resizing it in photoshop. The result was a small graphic that weighed in at 82k.)
However, it’s all redeemed by the great content. Most of the time.
—Mr. Argyle