Everybody agrees that mobile computing is big and important. Everyone and their sibling is using a tablet or a phone. Wait, a tablet? That's so yesterday: I browse the web on a phone now. Ooh, no, not a phone. Google glass...no, I mean a Microsoft Hololens that hasn't been released yet.
By the way, my tablet seems to agree with me on Hololens, since it tried to suggest "hollowness".
So why do so many web sites work so badly on mobile devices? There are so many ways they screw up:
- Tiny little links, particularly lists of words so that you can hardly squeeze your fingertip on one without hitting its neighbours.
- Menus that only appear if you hover your mouse over them, so you don't even know they're there.
- Loading dozens of animations and gratuitous special effects, so your phone is so overloaded you can feel it starting to melt.
But the worst is the pop-up. A window appears in the centre of the page, asking you to subscribe to something or other. But they've positioned the pop-up based on the assumption that you have a desktop screen. So a window that's supposed to be a little message in the middle ends up covering your entire phone. The true frustration sets in if they've programmed the window to stay in the same place even if you try scrolling down the page. Then you end up as a modern Sisyphus, forever scrolling down to get to a "close" button you'll never reach.
I don't understand why this is such a problem. Aside from everyone agreeing that the mobile Net is important, there is plenty of software to help you create web pages that react to the size of the screen. So there's no excuse. In the early days of the Web there was a rule not to bother with a page that needed a minute to load. Well now there should be a rule not to bother with a page that doesn't fit your device.
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