It is not 1997!

I started MacRelations back in 1997(ish) (originally with Joel Muller who started MacUpdate… dunno if he owns it now but damn good job.  At the time Version Tracker was pretty much the only game in town and I sorta thought he was a bit of a nutter… that’s why other smart folks make d big bucks )

Anyway to my point.

Back in 1997 there was this annoying little thing amateurs did of embedding MIDI files into pages so that Netscape Navigator could butcher even the best melodies.  It was universally panned, and frankly I cannot imagine being a site owner who even updates monthly and listening to that garbage.  It was something that immediately made a site look cheap and stupid. (Much as guys wearing glittery nail polish or girls bleaching their hair and wearing lingerie does in high school)  But alas this trend began to fade.

Then came MySpace.  MySpace deservers a whole volume of articles discussing its problems but apparently Tom thought something like ‘Hey I miss those crappy old netscape pages what can we do?’  So whenever going to a MySpace page (especially at work) you’d mute the computer since you had about a 75% chance of random crappy music causing your browser to go all spinning beach ball for 5 strait minutes before blaring the worst hits of Van Halen.  This trend started to make glittery nail polish guy and ditsy hey look I’m wearing my underwear to school girl look dignified.  Thankfully rather than have it be less common to see this crap on MySpace everyone worth knowing got a Facebook account and told Tom thanks but um no.

Now in a perfect world this article would be finished and we’d all be surfing a web where you are politely asked whether some HIGH VOLUME GARBAGE should AUTOMATICALLY LOAD when visiting a page.  Unfortunately however some Sadistic guy in advertising somewhere came up with a really cool idea.  By really cool idea I mean he should be frozen to death at one of the not-actually-melting-really polar ice caps.

Allusions aside.  When the hell did big business, professional sites, the main stream media, etc begin thinking this garbage was a good idea?  I have been to 3 web sites this morning all of whom belong to what are generally considered respectable publications.  Each has assailed me with a random stupid flash ad after it finished loading that takes up the whole screen and just makes me hate the company they pitched that crap to.  Two of them required me to hunt around for a mute button so I don’t wake up my 2 year old.

To whoever thinks that automatically loading high volume garbage is a good idea please immediately see your physician and get a prescription for cyanide.