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<h1>Web Designers, Please Don't Animate Page Titles</h1>
<p>
If you visit
<a href="https://www.expressoil.com">Express Oil Change's web site</a>,
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
<img src="https://nextcloud.53hor.net/index.php/s/TWDbzjiSwzHbMcz/preview" />
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
<img src="https://nextcloud.53hor.net/index.php/s/TbbDnnL3jnZMT3g/preview" />
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
<img src="https://nextcloud.53hor.net/index.php/s/ocQofL2Goxd3AsQ/preview" />
</p>
<p>
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 <em>constantly changing</em>, 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.
</p>
<p>
<img src="https://nextcloud.53hor.net/index.php/s/AcNgR4cDxGDsWCB/preview" />
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
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