Bad Web Sites Can Cause "Mouse Rage"

alphadogg writes "Badly designed Web sites may have negative effects on a user's immune, cardiovascular, and nervous systems, a study says. The study of 2,500 users was commissioned by Rackspace Managed Hosting and published by the UK's Social Issues Research Centre. It found that five technology flaws in Web sites may have deleterious effects." How long before the first class action suit in the U.S. over bad Web site design?

Comments

Hazzardous to health

[edwardpickman]

I'm waiting for some one to have an epileptic fit from all the flashing banners on some sites.

I find this to be ironic...

[Travoltus]

Steal an mp3 = zillions of dollars in damages

Cause health problems for thousands or millions = no damages?

And people tell me that corporations don't have special rights.......

hint: I mean, let's take away the corporations' special rights...

Re:Web sites may have deleterious effects?

[Mr2cents]

What do you expect? Most journalists don't have a clue about science (just a few days ago I read "a 10.000km^2 radius" - what genius wrote that?). And even if they do, they need their articles to be read. That means they have to keep it simple and sensational.

Sigh.. I'm really starting to dislike joe average..

Exciting/Depressing IE dev story

[IdahoEv]

I'll give you a very depressing example. Everyone knows about the well-documented IE CSS bugs on Position is everything. A pain they are, but with sufficient hours of slaving away you can hack-around or workaround them, because they are known problems.

But nearly every project, I run into some mysterious *new* IE bug that takes hours to figure out. Here's my favorite example.

Circa 2004, I'm working on the site for Ecliptic Enterprises when I discover that the drop-down navigator menu doesn't work on all the pages. On the staff profile / resume pages, mousing over the menu does not cause it to drop down. It works on all the other pages.

But those menus are defined in an external file that is included on every page. So why would they work on some pages, but not the others? I check several times to make sure that the php code is rendering the menus identically on every page. diff confirms that the HTML, css, and javascript for the menus are 100% identical on all pages. So obviously (I think), some weird interaction with the page's content is breaking the javascript.

I begin systematically removing blocks of HTML trying to find what is breaking the menus on these specific pages. I remove each block, reload to see if the problem is fixed, diff the PHP outputs to check what I've done, replace the block, move on to the next block. I get to the end of the file and nothing has fixed the problem. So I try it over again from the beginning, removing code blocks and NOT replacing them before going on to the next.

After quite some time, I have stripped these pages down to zero content -- just the menus and other nav structure that is common to all pages. Yet the menus still won't function! I strip the remaining common parts of the page until there is nothing but a bare menu in my test file -- it still doesn't work! But the menus work happily on ~50 other pages on the site! About four hours have gone by.

By now I have so many copies of the page (dozens) that I am losing track of what I've tried in what order. profile_test001.php. profile_test002.php profile_whatthehellisgoingonhere.php. Eventually I copy the original page to an entirely different name to start anew. That copy, apparently identical to the original ... works just fine. I start to think I am losing my mind. I have been at this for five hours. I must have copied a different file than I thought. I try it again, using fresh copy of the file from backup. Menus don't work. I copy it to a different file name. Now the menus work. I really am losing my mind.

But no, after testing for an hour, I come to this bizarre, but inescapable conclusion:
if the filename of the webpage contains the string "profile", the drop-menus do not work in IE6. And no, the javascript does not examine the URL or any part of it in any way.

I rename all of the resume pages from "profile_.php" to "bio_.php". Suddenly the drop-menus on those pages work again in IE. My problem is fixed.

That's right, a sensitivity to the filename caused a javascript fault that broke my menus.

You can see it yourself, the files are still around. Boot up IE6, and visit the two following pages. They are bytewise identical, differing only in the filename. You can diff them to check:

http://www.eclipticenterprises.com/bio_ridenoure.p hp (menus work)
http://www.eclipticenterprises.com/profile_ridenou re2.php (menus break)

This bug, which I have never bothered to characterize further, cost me almost an entire workday. And in my experience, that kind of crap is absolutely typical of IE and has plagued me in every web project.

I haven't tested it in IE7. My windo