Web Designers, Please Don't "Animate" Page Titles

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- If you visit - Express Oil Change's web site, - everything seems completely ordinary until you leave the tab. That's - when the most distracting, broken, annoying example of over-the-top web - "design" rears its ugly head. -

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- I'm talking about this scrolling page title. In my tab. Constantly - moving from right to left to show me all of the text. It's the only tab - that's "moving" or "animated" and it doesn't stop until you return to - the tab. It's cheesy and gaudy. -

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- And it's also broken because there are emojis in the page title and the - title is obviously being "scrolled" by some script that's moving - byte-by-byte, so it scrolls halfway through a multi-byte UTF-8 emoji and - for a brief moment there's a glyph error character where a little red - car should have been. Bad judgment and bad programming. Worse than that, - even if it worked perfectly, it's incredibly annoying. -

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- If you bookmark the tab when it's in the middle of scrolling, you'll - bookmark this weird slice of the text that starts or ends in the middle - of a word or with a random emoji. -

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- Page titles changing is typically used to notify the user that their - action is needed, such as when a file is finished uploading. In this - case, since the text is constantly changing, the tab is always - in a state of "urgency." Most annoyingly, this causes the browser to - highlight the tab when it's pinned. Even if you click the tab and leave - it, this notification reappears. -

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- Don't do this. Stop. Get some help. It's distracting. It's the cheesy - "web dev" equivalent of retina scan advertising in Minority Report. Just - make a site that works and looks half decent without slowing to a halt - and stop there please. -