What is up with this?

September 17, 2000 6:20 PM

What is up with this? I thought the weblogging community was the only one to engage in petty bickering? What I want to know is, while I can understand having a free Geocities site or something just to flame somebody, utterly removing your paid-for site stikes me as a bit off-kilter.
posted by mrmorgan (9 comments total)

It's about someone who got a bee in his bonnet about this page which I've read off and on for years. It's always fascinating and informing.

The latter page is a legitimate page of criticisim and all the pages he cites as being poor ones he gives concrete reasons for. If there's a book, it's only recent.

Vincent's page doesn't exist just to hawk a book; the page existed for years before he decided to write any book.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 6:49 PM on September 17, 2000

Agreed. I've followed Flanders's page for years and, although I don't take it as gospel (same as Jakob Nielsen), it's a decent read. His picks for poorly-designed pages are often in line with my own opinions, which helps.

The book did come out fairly recently in the grande scheme of things.

But, I think it's also a bit much to go ahead and start up an anti-Vincent page... he's just one guy, after all. Then again, having the freedom to start an anti-Vincent page is what the net is all about.
posted by hijinx at 7:37 PM on September 17, 2000

Flanders was pointing out stolen designs way before it became fashionable in MeFi.

Anyhow, proving yet again that The Onion has nothing on real life irony, this anti-Flanders page should top any list of "web pages that suck." It seems to be made by someone who can't even add a mailto: link. And the entire site is aligned to center.
posted by tamim at 8:08 PM on September 17, 2000

I didn't want to go overboard on the link description, but I've been an avid follower of Vincent's work since I discovered his site. What amazes me is that someone took down whatever hobby or professional site was there and replaced it completely with a rant, to the tune of whatever the domain name and hosting is costing. I admit I can be a little crazy sometimes, but there's crazy and there's crazy that cost you money. Ugh.
posted by mrmorgan at 9:51 PM on September 17, 2000

I thought it was a joke- the guy seems to have gone out of his way to do all the things Flanders complains about. Why, the first half of the page has a counter, an under construction message, text as graphics, incorrect punctuation in the title, underlined text that isn't a link, and centered text. I can't wait for the addition of the animated spinning globe, animated flames, and (of course) the animated rainbow horizontal rule.
posted by dogwelder at 9:04 AM on September 18, 2000

Blink tag!
posted by aaron at 11:00 AM on September 18, 2000

I think you mean BLINK TAG!
posted by dogwelder at 12:28 PM on September 18, 2000

Well, it is his site, and he can do what he wants with it. The thing I got out of this thread is more along the lines of constitutional rights and freespeech. In real life, if someone publishes something slandering or insulting about a private individual, they can be sued. If you bad-mouth or defame an individual who 'places themself in the public eye', i.e. politicians and movie stars (see Larry Flynt v. Jerry Falwell), they can't really defend themselves in court because they voluntarily expose themselves to the criticism.My point is, since the web is accessible to everyone, Anyone who has a website has no legal precedent to go after someone who defames or slanders them. Interesting stuff.Of course, my knowledge of this matter is based on a 9 month long Constitutional Law class back in senior year of high school, so don't take my word for law.
posted by tomorama at 5:25 PM on September 18, 2000

Well, this site, however slanderous, is accurate in pointing out that Flanders is not really the design angel he purports to be - he doesn't seem to be aware of the idea of window reuse, so after 5 minutes on his site I'd manually closed a dozen of his pop-up windows. I guess I've been spoiled by the weblog world where it's commonplace to use post-1997 technical concepts like "un/click this checkbox to open links in a new window," arguments presented in a clear linear format, and server-side scripting in order to avoid slow-downloading frames.
posted by geegaw at 11:24 PM on September 18, 2000