Media Blog

A black hole is the perfect place for stuff you never want to see again. So Webmonkey is joining Wired.com’s extended black hole party by chucking in some of the worst technologies ever to grace the web’s sleek, well-machined tubes.

This purging project was kicked off by our pals at Wired’s Underwire blog. They were inspired by scientists at the Israel Institute of Technology who, while searching for Hawking radiation, recently created an acoustic black hole using Bose-Einstein condensates. So Underwire jumped on the opportunity to throw five terrible albums into that black hole, never to be heard again. Autopia then launched five atrocious car models into a black hole (the regular kind out in space, of course). Other blogs followed suit — Wired Science chose its worst science writing clichés, Gadget Lab banished its most hideous hardware and Game Life picked five of history’s worst games. This week is our turn.

The web hasn’t been around nearly as long as videogames, the phonograph or the auto industry. But it sure has seen its share of total failures, major annoyances and eyeball-shredding pixelated shitstorms. After consultation with Webmonkey’s staff and key contributors, we’ve come up with a list of the web’s worst offenders.

1. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6

We’re taking care of this one first, and it shouldn’t require much of an argument. One of the most reviled pieces of software on the web or anywhere, IE 6 debuted in 2001 and immediately started causing headaches among web developers and corporate IT staff. It didn’t properly support stylesheets and other web standards, didn’t properly display web graphics and quickly developed a bad reputation for its many security problems. It didn’t help that it shipped with every copy of Windows sold, or that Microsoft didn’t release a significant update until IE 7’s arrival a full six years later.

Maddeningly, something like a fifth of the web’s users are still surfing with IE 6. Some sites, like YouTube and Digg, have even announced they’re going to stop supporting it, hoping collective action can force the blind masses (or their overseers in IT) into upgrading. We’d like to speed things along and offer IE6 a first class ticket into the black hole. Free, no strings.

2. MySpace

In theory, MySpace is a great product — the web, after all, was built to encourage communication and community. Some very nice, intelligent people work there. It kick-started the widget craze. And along with Friendster, MySpace is responsible for introducing social networking to the mainstream.

But it’s the other things MySpace introduced that make it worthy of a one-way trip down the throat of Cygnus X-1. Namely: the ease with which anyone (really, anyone) can make a sparkly, spangly, pink unicorn-bedecked profile page with which to punish their friends as if they were their worst enemies; a user interface lifted from a mid-’70s Soviet ATM; those infernal auto-playing music widgets; the spam — Oh, sweet lord, the spam!

To be fair, MySpace did eventually disable the auto-play function of its default music player. But its other sins are too great to overlook.

3. Auto-playing audio/video widgets

Do you think we’re too dumb to figure out how a “Play” button works or something?

4. Drop-down lists in address forms with every country on the planet

These long lists are easily replaceable with a suggest-as-you-type Ajax box, plus some sort of filtering and alert system so you don’t end up accepting bad data. Better yet, how about automatically filling in a choice for the user with your best guess? It’s not too hard to do if you know the person’s IP address. And, using the newly proposed Geolocation API and geo-aware tools within the browser, it’s already possible to do away with the lower half of those address forms in most cases.

5. #99ff33

Known colloquially as “Acid Green,” this color was once near and dear to our hearts. It was part of the original Hotwired brand’s color scheme, showing up as an accent color in older designs of Wired News and Webmonkey, and even playing a primary role in the design of Wired’s old search engine, HotBot.

But you know what? The web-safe color palette is dead. We’ve moved on to more pleasant tones that don’t remind us of 1998 — or the morning after that party where we mistakenly downed about 16 Midori Sours.

6. The <blink> tag

Yeah, it’s officially deprecated, and most browsers just ignore it. But we’d prefer to pretend it never existed in the first place. Goodbye. If we have room, we’ll send <marquee> along to keep it company.

7. Google Base

The supposed goal of this forgotten product was to rival Craigslist by letting people enter database information directly into Google’s brain. But Google Base came off as too esoteric a vision worth doing at all. With no real interface and poor support, it ended up being totally impractical. We don’t think the guy who originally said “All your base are belong to us” got what he wanted, either.

8. GIFs

Animated GIFs in particular, but also spacer GIFs and crufty, pixelized raster image GIFs that should really be JPEGs anyway. It’s the 21st century, we have PNGs now (and we already tossed IE6, so they should show up properly). Let’s do away with this nonsense and send the file format where it belongs — down the black hole. Or, at the very least, donate it to the world of retro-kitch art.

Black hole illustration: ESA/NASA, the AVO project and Paolo Padovani

See Also:

• 10 Things to Do on the Web When IE6 Is Dead
• Fed Up With MySpace? Join the Club and Delete Your Account [Underwire]
• Google and Mozilla Team Up to Tell Firefox Where You Are
• Use CSS to Hack Around Browser Incompatibilities

A black hole is the perfect place for stuff you never want to see again. So Webmonkey is joining Wired.com’s extended black hole party by chucking in some of the worst technologies ever to grace the web’s sleek, well-machined tubes.

This purging project was kicked off by our pals at Wired’s Underwire blog. They were inspired by scientists at the Israel Institute of Technology who, while searching for Hawking radiation, recently created an acoustic black hole using Bose-Einstein condensates. So Underwire jumped on the opportunity to throw five terrible albums into that black hole, never to be heard again. Autopia then launched five atrocious car models into a black hole (the regular kind out in space, of course). Other blogs followed suit — Wired Science chose its worst science writing clichés, Gadget Lab banished its most hideous hardware and Game Life picked five of history’s worst games. This week is our turn.

The web hasn’t been around nearly as long as videogames, the phonograph or the auto industry. But it sure has seen its share of total failures, major annoyances and eyeball-shredding pixelated shitstorms. After consultation with Webmonkey’s staff and key contributors, we’ve come up with a list of the web’s worst offenders.

1. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6

We’re taking care of this one first, and it shouldn’t require much of an argument. One of the most reviled pieces of software on the web or anywhere, IE 6 debuted in 2001 and immediately started causing headaches among web developers and corporate IT staff. It didn’t properly support stylesheets and other web standards, didn’t properly display web graphics and quickly developed a bad reputation for its many security problems. It didn’t help that it shipped with every copy of Windows sold, or that Microsoft didn’t release a significant update until IE 7’s arrival a full six years later.

Maddeningly, something like a fifth of the web’s users are still surfing with IE 6. Some sites, like YouTube and Digg, have even announced they’re going to stop supporting it, hoping collective action can force the blind masses (or their overseers in IT) into upgrading. We’d like to speed things along and offer IE6 a first class ticket into the black hole. Free, no strings.

2. MySpace

In theory, MySpace is a great product — the web, after all, was built to encourage communication and community. Some very nice, intelligent people work there. It kick-started the widget craze. And along with Friendster, MySpace is responsible for introducing social networking to the mainstream.

But it’s the other things MySpace introduced that make it worthy of a one-way trip down the throat of Cygnus X-1. Namely: the ease with which anyone (really, anyone) can make a sparkly, spangly, pink unicorn-bedecked profile page with which to punish their friends as if they were their worst enemies; a user interface lifted from a mid-’70s Soviet ATM; those infernal auto-playing music widgets; the spam — Oh, sweet lord, the spam!

To be fair, MySpace did eventually disable the auto-play function of its default music player. But its other sins are too great to overlook.

3. Auto-playing audio/video widgets

Do you think we’re too dumb to figure out how a “Play” button works or something?

4. Drop-down lists in address forms with every country on the planet

These long lists are easily replaceable with a suggest-as-you-type Ajax box, plus some sort of filtering and alert system so you don’t end up accepting bad data. Better yet, how about automatically filling in a choice for the user with your best guess? It’s not too hard to do if you know the person’s IP address. And, using the newly proposed Geolocation API and geo-aware tools within the browser, it’s already possible to do away with the lower half of those address forms in most cases.

5. #99ff33

Known colloquially as “Acid Green,” this color was once near and dear to our hearts. It was part of the original Hotwired brand’s color scheme, showing up as an accent color in older designs of Wired News and Webmonkey, and even playing a primary role in the design of Wired’s old search engine, HotBot.

But you know what? The web-safe color palette is dead. We’ve moved on to more pleasant tones that don’t remind us of 1998 — or the morning after that party where we mistakenly downed about 16 Midori Sours.

6. The <blink> tag

Yeah, it’s officially deprecated, and most browsers just ignore it. But we’d prefer to pretend it never existed in the first place. Goodbye. If we have room, we’ll send <marquee> along to keep it company.

7. Google Base

The supposed goal of this forgotten product was to rival Craigslist by letting people enter database information directly into Google’s brain. But Google Base came off as too esoteric a vision worth doing at all. With no real interface and poor support, it ended up being totally impractical. We don’t think the guy who originally said “All your base are belong to us” got what he wanted, either.

8. GIFs

Animated GIFs in particular, but also spacer GIFs and crufty, pixelized raster image GIFs that should really be JPEGs anyway. It’s the 21st century, we have PNGs now (and we already tossed IE6, so they should show up properly). Let’s do away with this nonsense and send the file format where it belongs — down the black hole. Or, at the very least, donate it to the world of retro-kitch art.

Black hole illustration: ESA/NASA, the AVO project and Paolo Padovani

See Also:

• 10 Things to Do on the Web When IE6 Is Dead
• Fed Up With MySpace? Join the Club and Delete Your Account [Underwire]
• Google and Mozilla Team Up to Tell Firefox Where You Are
• Use CSS to Hack Around Browser Incompatibilities

Google has ignited speculation about the future of video on the web with its recent announcement that the company plans to acquire On2 Technologies, makers of a number of video codecs.

HTML 5 fans are hoping that, if the acquisition is approved, Google will turn around and make the newly acquired codec open-source — a move that could end the circular and unresolved debate over which video codec should be part of the markup language’s specification, which is still in draft.

Google has hinted at this outcome in its announcement of the acquisition.

“Although we’re not in a position to discuss specific product plans until after the deal closes, we are committed to innovation in video quality on the web, and we believe that On2 Technologies’ team and technology will help us further that goal,” write Jeremy Doig and Mike Jazayeri from Google’s video group.

The debate over codecs revolves around the <video> tag, which is a new addition in HTML 5. The tag makes it simple to embed movies on the web without resorting to proprietary, third-party tools like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight.

There are currently two codecs being considered — Mozilla and Opera want to use the Ogg Theora codec, which is believed to be free of patent restrictions, while Apple and Google are pushing for H.264. Google plans to support both in its Chrome browser.

Apple doesn’t like Ogg because it claims there may be “submarine” patent issues — that is, Ogg Theora might expose Apple to patent lawsuits. Google doesn’t like Ogg because it says the quality isn’t up to snuff. There’s also concern that there are currently no Ogg Theora-optimized video chips, a fact which would slow adoption on smartphones and other devices.

For their part, Mozilla and Opera have balked at the licensing terms and fees surrounding the H.264.

Microsoft has thus far stayed out of the debate has announced no plans to support the video tag at all.

Faced with the deadlock and tired of being hung up on one tag in much larger spec, HTML 5’s benevolent dictator, Ian Hickson, recently announced that HTML 5 will not specify a single codec for implementing video tag support.

Which is not to say that the <video> tag is dead. In fact the <img> tag also fails to specify a format and, as we all know, it’s a key part of HTML.

As it is, there are two possible solutions. First, Apple changes its mind and embraces Ogg, or the web waits until the licenses surrounding H.264 expire and Mozilla and Opera hop on that bandwagon. Neither case is particularly appealing for developers who just want an easy, free way to get video on the web sooner rather than later.

Enter Google’s On2 acquisition. If Google’s deal is approved, and if Google turns around and makes the codecs open-source, it could provide a solution for the current deadlock. Just bear in mind that, at least for now, those are two big ifs.

See Also:

• How Firefox Is Pushing Open Video Onto the Web
• Google Throws Its Weight Behind HTML 5
• W3C Drops Audio and Video Codec Requirements From HTML 5
• Ogg’s Creator On Why Open Media Formats Still Rule

Google has ignited speculation about the future of video on the web with its recent announcement that the company plans to acquire On2 Technologies, makers of a number of video codecs.

HTML 5 fans are hoping that, if the acquisition is approved, Google will turn around and make the newly acquired codec open-source — a move that could end the circular and unresolved debate over which video codec should be part of the markup language’s specification, which is still in draft.

Google has hinted at this outcome in its announcement of the acquisition.

“Although we’re not in a position to discuss specific product plans until after the deal closes, we are committed to innovation in video quality on the web, and we believe that On2 Technologies’ team and technology will help us further that goal,” write Jeremy Doig and Mike Jazayeri from Google’s video group.

The debate over codecs revolves around the <video> tag, which is a new addition in HTML 5. The tag makes it simple to embed movies on the web without resorting to proprietary, third-party tools like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight.

There are currently two codecs being considered — Mozilla and Opera want to use the Ogg Theora codec, which is believed to be free of patent restrictions, while Apple and Google are pushing for H.264. Google plans to support both in its Chrome browser.

Apple doesn’t like Ogg because it claims there may be “submarine” patent issues — that is, Ogg Theora might expose Apple to patent lawsuits. Google doesn’t like Ogg because it says the quality isn’t up to snuff. There’s also concern that there are currently no Ogg Theora-optimized video chips, a fact which would slow adoption on smartphones and other devices.

For their part, Mozilla and Opera have balked at the licensing terms and fees surrounding the H.264.

Microsoft has thus far stayed out of the debate has announced no plans to support the video tag at all.

Faced with the deadlock and tired of being hung up on one tag in much larger spec, HTML 5’s benevolent dictator, Ian Hickson, recently announced that HTML 5 will not specify a single codec for implementing video tag support.

Which is not to say that the <video> tag is dead. In fact the <img> tag also fails to specify a format and, as we all know, it’s a key part of HTML.

As it is, there are two possible solutions. First, Apple changes its mind and embraces Ogg, or the web waits until the licenses surrounding H.264 expire and Mozilla and Opera hop on that bandwagon. Neither case is particularly appealing for developers who just want an easy, free way to get video on the web sooner rather than later.

Enter Google’s On2 acquisition. If Google’s deal is approved, and if Google turns around and makes the codecs open-source, it could provide a solution for the current deadlock. Just bear in mind that, at least for now, those are two big ifs.

See Also:

• How Firefox Is Pushing Open Video Onto the Web
• Google Throws Its Weight Behind HTML 5
• W3C Drops Audio and Video Codec Requirements From HTML 5
• Ogg’s Creator On Why Open Media Formats Still Rule