I came across a website for a court clerk. The site looks fine on Internet Explorer, but is absolutely unreadable on Firefox or Safari. For some reason, the designer wanted to use Edwardian Script, which was specified in a broken font tag. Internet Explorer ignored the broken tag, so the website was readable. However, Firefox and Safari recognized the tag, and applied the Edwardian Script to most of the text. Yikes. Save the script for wedding invitations. Use Arial, or Helvetica, if you curse the scourge of Arial.

I’m came across a website for a county this afternoon. At first, I tried to click on some of the links in the navigation, but that didn’t work. Then, I noticed the the warning at the bottom of the page:

Some links on this web page/site will be blocked if you have a “pop-up blocker” running on your computer. You will need to “Allow Blocked Content”, or make www.*****.org a “trusted site”.

C’mon. Why not just open the link in the existing window instead of forcing the user to open a new window? After all, this is pretty much the way the rest of the Internet works, except for those site that created a need to install a pop-up blocker in the first place. Then again, we don’t install pop-up blockers any more since Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari all ship with pop-up blockers built-in nowadays. Don’t fight the trend. Pop-up blockers are in place for a reason. Most people probably will not have noticed the pop-up blocker note and have thought your website was broken.