Resident Alien's Guide to Egogratifying HTML Style

RESIDENT ALIEN

Guidelines for Web Designers

It has come to our attention that there are still some people who have failed to grasp the nettle (or is that Nettlescape?) and are creating web pages that look like this one.

How droll.
How sad.

Here are some guidelines to help you avoid that.

Do use FRAMEs. This will
- force a browser to display images and multicolored type even if the user has tried to disable these features.
- provide lots of nice little boxes, suitable in dimension to the scope of your creative talents.
- allow you to seize control of navigation from the user. You are in control. You! YOU can get back at all those people who made you "take a number, please."
Do substitute a 50k GIF image dipicting five words instead of using 25 bytes of unsightly, boring text wherever possible. If you do this enough, the user will fall into a stupor while waiting for the images to transfer and probably won't notice that you don't actually have anything to say.
Do, in the unfortunate event that you find yourself obliged to include some actual text, use several colors and sizes of type. You will engender in the user the same warm glow that you yourself feel when you open your important, personal, time-sensitive letter from Publisher's Clearinghouse. Why allow yourself to be confined by the results of five hundred years of typographic design evolution?
Do use lots of animated GIFs. Unless you are a true wizard, your web page will not be 100% content-free. The little twiddling thingamies will re-cycle twice during every sentence, distracting the user from grasping any inadvertant content that may have slipped in. Begin to use new animation technology like VRML or DHTML as soon a possible, preferably before it's accepted as a standard. Your users will love you because they will see how much smarter you are than they.
Do use Javascript menus instead plain old <A HREF... anchor tags. That way you can keep the URLs of your documents as trade secrets. You can decide when someone may read one of them. Use CGI scripts for everything you can't figure out how to do in Javascript. Your users will love you for the reason mentioned above.
Do use <BODY BACKGROUND... images. With a little effort, you can guarantee that no browser will be able to render your documents as anything but green text on an oscillating red moiré or chartreuse text on a shimmering orange plaid. No one can read that so they'll be forced to look at your pretty pictures.
Do create large, complex <TABLE... constructs for plain text. Let your imagination go wild. The more separate little blocks of type you can cram onto the screen, the less likely it is that anyone will be able to make any sense out of it. And you'll defeat the text search capability of some browsers as a bonus.
TABLEs are especially useful for long documents over slow connections because the user's browser can't begin rendering until the whole document has downloaded, so he's encouraged to fall into a trance watching the blank screen.
Do break large, difficult texts — ones with, say, ten sentences or more or with three-syllable words — up into many smaller documents, connected with hyperlinks or java menus. One sentence on a page is, after all, quite enough, considering all the dingbats, banners, logos, copyright notices, clipart, animation, designer credits and scripts you need to get into it. And it will look better on your resume if you've managed a site with 1200 documents. Who'll know it was only 2000 words?
Do use sound, video, flashblaster files or other nifty ornamental data types that require the user to download a plugin or viewer. Even better if they have to go out and buy a special circuit board. Make it impossible to make sense of your material unless the user undertakes this extra act of contrition in submission to your ego. Demand that kind of commitment — After all, you are in charge here, right?
Do use lots of cookies. People who don't mind won't, obviously, mind. People who do mind will will froth at the mouth with rage when they have to deal with all those cookie announcement boxes. People who are frothing at the mouth with rage are, at least temporarily, not smarter than you are.
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Do use proprietary file formats like PDF. Make sure that your user submits to indenture to your own personal corporate fief lord. After all, you blew US$795 plus applicable taxes for that software so that you could create pictures of documents. Make the user look at them. Be sure he can't do anything with your information. It's yours, YOURS! And you can help decide whether Adobe, Microsoft or AOL will get to own the world.
Do include many images at the top of your pages. Use ALT attributes liberally, employing clever remarks unrelated to the subject of the document. <IMG SRC=... ALT="You'd be looking at a cute picture of a rubber duckie if you were using a graphical browser">would be good for, say, a pharmaceuticals page. This will ensure that the excerpts presented by popular search engines don't offer any clues about your page's contents.
And don't forget to include a supercilious, condescending sneer, directing your hapless visitor to Upgrade Now to your favorite version of your favorite browser and adjust window size, screen resolution and color map to your favorite settings. No sense in jerking them around, is there, unless you get to tell them you're in charge? Is there? Of course not.

Well, there's more — more advanced techniques — but we'll take a break here.

Well now...

Why would you want to go to the trouble of following these guidelines?

Attract obedient sheep. Tell them to do it your way and they'll do it. Tell them to buy your product and they'll buy it. Tell them to buy more of your product and they'll buy more. Tell them....
Ahh..Ha..hahaheeheeheeeeee...aaiiiiieeee...snerk!
Obfuscate.Your government agency can create the illusion of openness and freely available information about how their government works without revealing anything of any substance about your agenda.
Suppress thinking. Television zombies will recognize their home pasture. The more your pages look like TV, the more likely your visitors are to be in a suggestible trance state when they look at them. After all, dentists put TVs over their chairs to help you fall into a trance state and forget that they're excavating your central nervous system with a power tool. Make it work for you, too.
Lighten the load on your server. The visually impaired who depend on text to voice devices will be completely stumped by your pages. But who need crips, anyhow, right? Insignificant market sector, inconsequential voting block. Don't worry about them.
Avoid irritation. Literate people will be annoyed and go away. Well, you didn't want to attract eggheads and intelletchuals anyway, did you? Who needs them? They send you email containing criticisms that you don't understand and make you feel like a No-Good Shit^tm.

Oh yes... There's one more category of person who will be duly impressed with your efforts. This type of person lives in a log cabin at the end of a dirt lane in the hills with a hand pump, wood heat, outhouse, eleven computers and a small but lovely machine shop. He has Ph.D. in somthing you think of, erroneously, as "rocket science". He will scrutinize your work in detail and at length. He will savour it. He will drive his Jeep into town and and make purchases. He will labor over a token of appreciation. He will send you a lovingly crafted and carefully wrapped copy of his manifesto. An anonymous, leather-bound copy. Page 9 will be smeared with a neurotoxic organophosphate compound. Page 51 will be impregnated with a home-grown culture of ebola. Pages 106-110 will be printed on sheets of Semtex and what looks like a spill stain will be a remarkably clever detonator made from lemon Jell-O and a 1943 zinc penny. He will sleep the sleep of the just and giggle in his dreams. But don't think about that....

Resident Alien is an occasional publication of the Bridgewater Institute for Advanced Study. It appears variously in electronic, paper and other formats such as serial gummed labels.