Web design – Sore Eyes

If my job involved web development, I’d be inclined to get hold of a copy of Heydon Pickering’s Inclusive Components: The Book.

Taking the entry on A Content Slider, we start with this…

Carousels (or ‘content sliders’) are like men. They are not literally all bad — some are even helpful and considerate. But I don’t trust anyone unwilling to acknowledge a glaring pattern of awfulness. Also like men, I appreciate that many of you would rather just avoid dealing with carousels, but often don’t have the choice. Hence this article.

Carousels don’t have to be bad, but we have a culture of making them bad. […]

… followed by a reasoned explanation of how to do this stuff better for everyone, including plenty of snippets of CSS illustrating step-by-step how it all works. From my point of view as an interested amateur, it look to be good work, communicated very effectively.

[Via Pinboard: philgyford]

I know this isn’t exactly breaking news, but there’s a small part of me that almost admires how thoroughly Amazon hide away the account-closing option [note]Strictly speaking, there is no account-closing link on their web site: Amazon insist that their customer speaks/chats to a Customer Service representative before they’ll let their customer instruct the Customer Service rep start the account closure process for the customer’s account.[/note] on their web site. Just look at the first part of this NerdWriter video for way more on just how hard they’ve worked to hide that sucker:

Amazon unaccountably failed to put the relevant menu option on a page headed Beware of the Leopard but in every other respect they’re living down to Jeff Bezos’ background as a former hedge fund manager [note]Which is to say, a man who will pinch every single penny that he can[/note] by behaving this way. Call it a dark pattern or just a dick move; the sad thing is how prevalent this sort of nonsense is nowadays.

[Via kottke.org]