Must Haves That Never Should Have Been

A few weeks ago (has it been that long already?) we wrote a little story about PointCast and how it was an idea not so much ahead of its time, but an idea living in a completely different timeline. PointCast required so many resources and so much investment in time and energy from the user that it could never fulfill its promise. Something much simpler, the RSS reader, did the same thing and with less overhead and it is now the defacto method for getting push data.

This got us at The Times to thinking: What are some other "great" ideas from the early days that in retrospect were complete wastes of everyone's time.

1. Animated GIFs
   Yes, animated gifs are still with us, or at least the concept of an animated image. Now they are usually flash advertisements or embedded movies, but the fundamental concept is the same. They're all about making a logo more interesting and interactive. When we were working our first real job, our employer would charge extra for an animated gif on the site. We're not sure, but we're convinced that the an animated gif really didn't encourage people to click on a logo any more than a static gif, considering each had the same placement on the page. Still, we'd invest the time into creating one. (Ed Note: The best one we ever saw wasn't for a client at all. We had a gif that was on fire that said "Hot jobs". Above it was the "Search" button, unrelated. Our graphics designer created a version of the search button that would slowly grow darker and darker until it was completely charred, as if the fire from "Hot jobs" were burning it. It was up there for months until one day our manager had left the page idle over lunch. When he came back he had a minor coronary wondering where the search button went. Good times...)
   
   
2. Blink tag.
   Yes, we know the blink tag is the punchline to every early HTML joke (well, that and the marquee tag, and nesting one inside the other), but there was a time when it was crucial. All it did was blink the text (the marquee tag made the text scroll across the screen; now imagine them in tandem). If you didn't close the tag properly, your entire site text would blink. For that reason it was dropped, and we're not even sure any browser supports it anymore. But it was there, and people used to ask for it. We'd have requests to make a link blink, or a piece of text blink in a posting because this would get people's attention. We think this rationale might have been the first time we heard the phrase "sticky eyeball", which still makes us squirm.
   
   
3. Frames
   The iFrame still exists, and it is very useful and very handy and very necessary. But the original implementation, the frame, was horrible. Imagine a part of the page that doesn't scroll while another part does. Great idea. Imagine that this part that doesn't scroll still has a big ugly border around it, and if improperly coded or designed it also has scroll bars. Now imagine two or three of these on a page to provide sub navigation. Imagine also that a 15" screen is considered HUGE and not many people have them. What you then have are a whole series of ugly, unreadable pages that people considered bleeding edge. And yes, we had requests from clients to put "those frame things" on their pages. Thankfully, as with the blink tag, something better came along.
   
   
4. Javascript in the status bar
   When JavaScript came out, it really changed the way most people saw and used the browser. Now instead of just being a reader, you could script it, make it interactive. The "Hello world", the little script that showed what you could do with JavaScript, included the ability to put a scrolling message in the status bar at the bottom of the browser. This is the area where you can look and see what page a link leads to, or the status of the current page (if there are errors, etc). This script was meant to be used for communications of that nature, but everyone thought it would be cool to put extra little messages there. Our company thought the best thing to put there was information on how to contact the sales team to buy advertising on the site.
   

   US: But people won't want to sit there and wait for this message to scroll to get the information. Also, if they move their mouse over a link it will break the scroll and they'll wonder where their information went. You're asking them to sit and look at a page for information they might not be interested in. Couldn't you do the same thing by just having a link that says either 'Contact sales department' or 'About us'?
   THEM: No, silly webmaster. We put the scroll here to show what the site can do, and then we'll use that to sell advertising. In fact, we might even sell that area for ads.
   US: How do you plan to sell advertising on something that people have to stare at instead of getting their work done?
   THEM: Just do it. We prepared a work order. These tech people don't understand what the Internet is for.
   

   What do you see on sites now? "About us" and "Contact us" links. What do you not see? Crucial information about a company in a little status bar, slowly scrolling.
   
   
5. Music.
   It used to be that be taken seriously, you had to have MIDI music playing when you loaded your site. If you wanted to really show off, you had a pause button on the screen as well. Forget copyright issues, it was just annoying and added nothing to the experience. While this still exists in Flash websites, at least it's not as prevalent as it used to be.

Five things that once every site had to have, which have thankfully either been improved or done away with. There's also DIVX, but that's for another time.

We're sure there are ones we're missing, so use the comment link below to share any that you might remember.