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