Let’s be fair - a LOT of malarkey from the 90’s is rearing it’s ugly head again… we go through this every few years. From “I HAVE to have this exact font everywhere” to autoplaying media to styling elements that you really have little business messing with… From framesets to javascript doing CSS’ job - it’s all there.
Hell, even PX metric fonts are making a resurgence with the total steaming piles of failure that make up the current crop of forum skins (vbull 4, myBB, phpBB - though phpBB never left them).
Just look at all the nimrods slapping up “best viewed in” garbage and the “don’t use IE” games of the people jumping the gun on specifications not even out of draft.
Which goes with something I always tell aspiring designers and developers - and for the former it’s often a bitter pill to swallow.
People do not visit websites for the cutesy **** graphics you hang on your layout - they visit for the content. You spend too much time messing around with the appearance of every little stupid element, you are probably neglecting not just the amount and quality of the content, but interfering with the users experience of getting to it. In the case of a LOT of this ‘gee ain’t it neat’ cutesy scripted trash, usually the net result is blowing 400k of images, 400k of javascript and 100k of markup/css on delivering a mere 3k of plaintext.
Of course the REALLY sad part is that things like styled scrollbars usually rely on browser specific code or javascript - making it dead weight/wasted bandwidth for the people not on the right browser or with javascript blocked…
The firefox noscript plugin and opera’s in-built per site enable/disable of scripting being VERY popular for a reason.
But let’s look under the hood of that blog… 12k of HTML, 88k of javascript spanning 13 SEPARATE FILES, 24k of CSS in four files - all to deliver what appears to be 3.6k of text that barely has any layout or styling applied to it… and leaving one asking the question 88k of javascript FOR WHAT?!? 35 validation errors in a tranny doctype means it’s not HTML, it’s gibberish - the document outline shows broken heading orders, etc, etc…
Sad part is a 8 bit .png screencap of the site would probably be smaller than the total combined page size… NO reason for that to be more than 8k of markup, MAYBE 12k of CSS - and I’m not seeing ANYTHING on that site that warrants the inclusion of javascript.
Especially since it looks like 90% of it doesn’t work on anything newer than IE6.