Web Design Mistakes of 1999 (1999) | Hacker News Reader

Web Design Mistakes of 1999 (1999)

nngroup.com

82 pointsselalipop15 comments

Hah. The good old days. Note that back in the day we didn't always agree with his pretty drastic opinions.

Today though, it reads as true as ever.

It's 2023, half these issues are still there and I still don't have my flying car.

Back then I saw him as the enemy of creative freedom but today I have to admit I agree with many of the things he said. Especially about the lame attempts at getting the user to stay on a site

Nielsen and A List Apart used to be the go-to sources for guidance on good web design. It's sad to read through that list as see that majority of sites published today make every mistake from that list.

Web Design Mistakes of 1999 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37128279 - Aug 2023 (1 comment)

The Top Web Design Mistakes of 1999 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16978394 - May 2018 (4 comments)

Top Web Design Mistakes of 1999 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7835566 - June 2014 (73 comments)

The irony of Web Design Mistakes of 1999 (1999) showing me a full page modal on visit asking for my cookie preferences.

Along with every other goddam page on the web. Welcome to 2023.

> 2. Opening New Browser Windows

Note that this very much includes new tabs as well. Do not add target=_blank without a very good reason since this breaks the user agent defaults. One very bad reason: internal links stay in my tab, but external links open in a new tab. No they don’t, they never have, & your website is not a snowflake. What you did is remove agency as there are a myriad of ways to override how to open a link in new window/tab from the user input side, but there is no way to do this to keep it in the current tab/window because it’s expected to be the default behavior.

"3d sitemaps" - Wow, I did not know there was a time of the internet where people wanted and invested in 3d sitemaps! Sounds like a an interesting point of research for interesting UI experiments

The first 3D sitemaps I can recall was a 1996 public demo project from an engineer at Apple.

He came up with RDF in order to describe the site structure enough for it to be rendered in a QuickTime-3D application.

> using an immediate redirect: every time the user clicks Back, the browser returns to a page that bounces the user forward to the undesired location

The stupid Microsoft pages login redirects, it's incredibly annoying! The damn thing pollute the back button like a plague.

Number 10:

Anything That Looks Like Advertising

How long until Google makes eye tracking a requirement of the open web, preventing anyone with banner blindness from using it?

To point out the obvious, all but the "lack of biographies" have only gotten worse. Maybe the biographies have too, but it doesn't seem as relevant as how the back button is now completely broken and links open new tabs all over the place, despite having a mouse button for doing just that.

This is so incredibly wrong: Once you have put a page on the Web, you need to keep it there indefinitely

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/web-pages-must-live-forever...

We need a curated web, not a swamp of every web page that ever existed.

No its not. Its not about keeping a swamp of old crap.

Its about keeping the url to avoid dead links and 404's.

Redirecting an old url to a new one with updated informmation is perfectly fine.

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