5 Old-Fashioned Web Concepts That Need To Die

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10065922-2.html?tag=mncol;title

Interesting. Let's go through these one by one.

1- Refresh. The author of this article apparently really hates having to use the refresh button to see the latest information on a website. I can understand the frustration of waiting for news on something and constantly having to reload a site, but having it work automatically seems to be asking for trouble. For example, if the internet went down, you would no longer be able to even look at the page you were looking at before the crash. Also, if information changed on the page you were reading, you would be lost, looking at something else where your article should be. Here's my solution: have a refresh toggle, so if you're in the middle of an article, you can turn off the auto-refresh until you're done, and then turn it back on to see what you missed. See? Everybody's happy!

2- Save. Well, isn't auto-save a pretty common feature at this point? That doesn't mean that you need to take away the save button. Word processors have been doing this all the way back to ClarisWorks, if I remember correctly.

3- Log-ins. "Keeping track of passwords for all the sites we visit is becoming unmanageable. There are better solutions," the author says. What confuses me here is that right before he has said this, he pointed to no more than three of those better solutions. True, they may not all be mainstream just yet, but if they work, then why not use them?

4- One-size-fits-all site design. I agree with this one. There are more and more mobile devices - BlackBerry, iPhone, Treo, and many of the newer cell phones - that will happily load a website for you. The problem there is that the websites it loads aren't made for mobile devices, and as such will take a very long time to load and may not be very useful once they do, because they've been made for a full-size computer screen with capabilities that far exceed those available on a mobile device.

5- Blocker ads. Those pesky things that take over your screen when you're trying to do something else, like the 30-second ads that pop up every time you try to watch something on Hulu. I have no problem watching an ad before and during, say, an episode of Bob Newhart, but when I just want to watch a few SNL clips, and I sit through more commercial than show, then that's getting really old. But what is there you can do about it? As the author states, "You go away, or at least you hesitate before you come back. Sites need to make money, but punishing users for viewing content is not just old-fashioned, it's medieval. The message should fit the medium, and TV-style advertising for the Web is not the right model." Hm. In most circumstances, I'd agree with this for the most part ("medieval" may be putting it a bit strongly for me), but when it comes to Bob Newhart, there's just not that many places that you can watch that show online for free, and sometimes it's worth it to put up with a bit of annoyance to get where you want to be. I think that taking that time to get a cup of tea may be a better solution than abandoning what you were trying to do in the first place.