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The Pope May Be Infallible When He Talks About Religion, But Not When He Talks About Web Design Award

Pontificate - John Paul II

In the early ages of the Internet I often visited your website for some tips or to show others why a particular solution or design they implemented didn't work.

Today after the passing away of the John Paul I thought I'd give his website a try and look into the history of these things.

Lo-an'-behold is this bad navigation or what?

First there is a Mystery Meat Navigation with intrusive Javascript popups and then there's "try to find a certain letter he wrote, only if you know the year he wrote it"

My original comments: I don't know whether to call this entry Mystery Meat Navigation or "Dead Meat Navigation" It's a perfect example of web page design gone crazy.

There are 95 images that have to load. That's just a tad excessive.

This is a sinful site and somebody needs to go to confession. Right now.

Reader comments: Ah, it's no wonder they didn't notice anything wrong with it. The Javascript is specifically designed to use Dynamic HTML for the popups only if a browser supports document.all or document.layers — otherwise it displays them as modal dialogs. No doubt the designers only tested the site in IE, so they failed to realize how UTTERLY BLEEDING AWFUL it is in Mozilla and Safari...

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There's still junk in IE. The long messages extend the little popup thing over top of the date. The result: as soon as you move your mouse a pixel, it disappears because you're no longer over the date — you're over the pop-up. And when you move ANOTHER pixel, it pops up again! The result is spastic blinking. To top it all off, an accidental drag (for those who hold their button down too long) will often crash the browser as it tries to select text that no longer exists!

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