You want to know what drives me nuts? Two things come to mind right off, and I'm going to make myself stick to two, because I'm tired and I want to read the rest of The Night Watch before my body cops out on me.

I hate it when people make graphics that are text and don't anti-alias them. One of my favorite diarists does this with the biggest graphic on her page, the one that's the name of her diary, and it distracts me whenever I load the page. The most infuriating thing about it is that right now, as I'm typing, her banner ad is blinking above my input window and the very same graphic is part of the ad, only here it's anti-aliased.

And I hate it when people include graphics in their pages and don't either put them in tables with defined dimensions or specify height and width attributes. Because what happens when you do that is that your text appears, I start reading it, and then your images load and the text moves. Which makes it pretty hard to read. One of my favorite diarists does that, too.

Okay, one more and then I'm going to bed. JavaScript errors. I kind of excuse these because, as Curtis pointed out, what is a JavaScript error in one browser is not necessarily an error in another. But if you can't write JavaScript with proper syntax, please don't do it. Because Netscape 6 ignores the errors, Netscape 4.7 mentions them in the status bar, and IE 4 generates a really annoying pop-up error window. Oh, and it sometimes crashes when you hit the back button on a page with error-ridden JavaScript without waiting for the pop-up window to appear.

So if you've committed any of these sins, please have mercy upon me. Fix your code. Be nice.

This message brought to you by CondescendingGwen, just one of the many flavors of Gwen. Sorry about that. I'm sure I'll be more myself when I've gotten some rest.