phil ringnalda

Sitepoint has some very good content: if nothing else, they employ (or, since it’s been nearly a month for Simon and three weeks for Harry, perhaps “employed”) both Simon Willison and Harry Fuecks as webloggers. But, they annoy me by very carefully bypassing Firefox’s popup blocking. They aren’t just clueless popup spewers, they do it once, and set a cookie (which has an interesting effect when you say “hey, how’d they do that?” and try to directly load the popup JavaScript) to not do it again, which I find more annoying: it’s like they know it’s wrong, they know it’s annoying and ill-mannered and doesn’t suit them, and they do it anyway.

Now, via technoweenie, I see that they are branding the middle-click autoscroll icon in Firefox. Everybody knows it’s a kludgy implementation, sticking the icon into the page’s DOM, and if anyone needed an example of how it can be abused they can always enable autoscrolling and middle-click Hixie’s blog, but here again, they knowingly exploit a bug to shove themselves even more into your face.

Sitepoint has some brilliant people, who really know their way around web technology. It’s just, sometimes, I wish they also had some people with a wee bit of sense and taste and decorum around, to keep the others in check.