There are some elements of web page design that really annoy me. Text boxes you must write long missives into, but they’re the size of a postage stamp; pages filled with moving images, the most notorious ones Flash animations, which are almost impossible to turn off; pages that automatically begin loading and playing music and/or movies without giving you a choice; designs which slavishly follow one browser’s authoritarian dictates, making the page unreadable by other browsers. And so on.

One common theme in all of this is the design element of taking control away from the user. When a user visits a web page, they should have ultimate control over what they see. They should be able to resize text boxes, turn off animations, set their browsers so that no audio or video plays without their approval. Not having any of that is like having a TV with no “mute” control. If surfing the net means having to put up with uncomfortable dictations of others, then it stops being fun and starts getting annoying.

Fortunately, a lot of the flaws I have outlines above have been dealt with; browser features and plug-ins/extensions exist that can deal with most or all of these irritants. However, one usually has to wait a few years between an nuisance being created by some idiot web page designer, and the cure becoming widely available. One recent example is CSS text sizing; browsers are unable to change the standard text size on a web page if it is CSS-based, which means that in order to make web page text readable on my 24-inch screen, I have to increase the text size manually on almost every page I visit.

Another common theme is designing web pages to a specific browser, almost always Internet Explorer. As I recently wrote within a post on a clueless switcher, “optimizing” a web page to IE simply means that instead of using universal design elements that every browser (and therefore every visitor) can parse, you instead use design elements that only work in IE, created by Microsoft so that lazy web page designers would design sites that would shut out competing browsers.

And yet, even people who use HTML commands which are universally recognized and yet still are holdbacks to drawbacks in the only recently-upgraded IE6 browser–which brings me to my pet peeve of today: links which open into a new window.

The culprit is the TARGET=”_BLANK” attribute to the link command. If a link is given that attribute, then a click on that link will make the browser open the new page in a separate window. The original intent of this feature was to allow the original web page to remain open while the user was presented with a new page to look at.

This feature became outdated, however, with the introduction of two browser design elements: first, the ability to open a link in a new window by right-clicking on a link and selecting that feature from the contextual menu; this allowed the user, not the web page designer, to make that choice. When that feature came out years ago, people should have stopped using the “target” attribute then and there. The second and more significant new element to outdate the “target” attribute was tabbed browsing, the entire reason for which was to eliminate extra windows, something which obviously annoys people. Under tabbed browsing, command-clicking a link (control-clicking for Windows users) will open the link in a new browser tab.

Either one of these accomplishes the task which the “target” attribute does, but better, they give the user the choice of what happens.

Web designers who use the “target” attribute, however, limit the user’s choices. Very often, I don’t want to see a new window (the entire reason for tabbed browsing, after all!), and I don’t want to keep the originating page open; the “target” attribute doesn’t give me these choices, at least not easily. In order for me to circumvent it, I have to first notice that the tag has been used (you have to keep an eye on the status bar which displays the target of a link your cursor is hovering over; it will tell you if a link will open “in a new window”), then you have to override the “feature” by command-clicking the link so it opens in a new tab instead of a new window, and then you have to close the offending page, then go to the end of your row of tabbed pages to get to the page you just linked to. A hassle.

Good web page design does not include the “target” attribute, and a good browser should have the option to disable that attribute.