Web Antipatterns
Check out this Review of Firefox at Net Gazette. It looks like a good old fashioned site at first but look closer. There is no actual text! The review consists completely of images... images of text. Each paragraph is a separate image arranged into tables for layout. What's even more interesting is how they, uh, "implemented" links. Each image-of-text has an image-map attached to it defining each links coordinates. I realize we need all the good press we can get but this site championing your browser is a bit like having the Ku Klux Klan back your presidential candidate.
I thought this was a really great example of a web architecture antipattern and it reminded me of something I wanted to point people to. The w3c recently put out the Architecture of the World Wide Web as a Proposed Recommendation. I really cannot express how much I like this document. It's very different from the recent slew of crap that has been flowing from the w3c. It isn't a specification at all, really, but rather a look at what the web got right. Sadly, using images-of-text-wrapped-in-tables isn't covered.
All content that comes to the web goes through a sucky phase before reaching true Web Zen. Reaching this elevated state requires answering the question, "What is it about the web medium that improves on existing forms of content delivery?" and then seizing them.
The Rise of Open-Source Politics