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Proof That San Francisco Courts Are Going to Hell

Superior Court of California County of San Francisco

My original comments: This is truly one of the worst government sites I've ever seen — and I've seen plenty of bad ones. Initially, I thought "Well, they made the design this bad because they were trying to use valid HTML." Wrong. There are 47 errors on the home page. I don't think any two pages on the site are alike.

The graphic buttons are a desperate cry for help. We have multi-colored text, scrolling text, buttons that look like links but aren't links, and so many other mistakes that this page should be used as a case study in bad web design. The question that immediately comes to my mind, "Is the legal system in SF just as bad as the court's web design?"

Reader comments: I am greeted by a huge yellow box with scary headline in scary capital letters and even scarier multiple exclamation marks. Maybe legal types normally communicate in this fashion — somehow, I doubt it — but when I am told to PLEASE READ THIS MESSAGE FIRST BEFORE... I assume that it's something to do with viruses or trojans. Nope, it's telling me I need a plugin to view scanned documents.

The thing is that that's all it tells me. It doesn't tell me what format the documents are in and which plugin I actually need to see them (maybe I already have the plugin — but how should I know?). It just tells me, in language that you rarely find outside of instructions on defusing nuclear warheads, that I need to download and install "the plug-in". It then gives me a link straight to an executable called setup.exe.

Uh, no thanks. Apart from the question as to why on earth they would want to provide documents in a format Windows users can only view with the aid of a plugin, who in their right mind would download anything with an .exe extension without knowing what it is, what it does, or even where it comes from?

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OMG ... someone associated with this website should be up on charges. The level of suck here is staggering in its own right, but the fact that it's intended to be a public information website makes it even worse.

Apparently these public documents are only available to Windows users using Internet Explorer, and (maybe) some Mac users. But Linux users, and users of any other browser than IE, have been disenfranchised. Good luck if you're a poor person trying to access court documents from a computer in your local library or something, where they don't allow you to download and install any random software that comes along — according to the Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco, you have no rights.

Other touches of professionalism, besides the screaming yellow box and the animated gavel, are the annoying scrolling marquee, the images (such as the buttons) anti-aliased for light backgrounds, hell, the whole black background in the first place, the icons culled from some "1,000,000 free images" CD, the resized images, and, of course, the last updated date 7 months ago.

Does it surprise anyone that this offense was committed with FrontPage? (or "AffrontPage" as I like to call it.)

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