HTML aesthetics

The Web is full of home pages.
Most of them are pointless, zero-content sludge
-- very snazzy-looking sludge, mind you, but sludge all the same
(Eric Steven Raymond, hacker's howto)



All there was to say about HTML design has been said;
my aesthetics on this point is almost coincident with ESR's;
I've a great admiration for him, and he has undoubtedly a great influence on my thinking;

so I've to justify some breakings to his "rules" about HTML style;
these are mainly ( in alphabetical order - you can read details in HTML hell) :

advertisements from hell
angst and pretentiousness
background MIDI, Flash, and other abominations
"Best viewed with..."
blinking text
broken HTML
brushscript headings
corporate logorrhea
frames
garish backgrounds
gratuitous animation
guestbooks
hit counters
Javascript, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
large fixed-size tables
marquees
menus made entirely from image maps
no email address for feedback
pages forever under construction
Pointless use of <small> or <font size=>
pointless vanity pages
pop-up windows
"resize your browser to..." instructions
stale links
unnecessary border spacing
unnecessary use of Java
unreadable text/background combinations
unstable extensions 'Til now I've found 3 exceptions : small font sizes, guestbooks and hit counters;

he says: Pointless use of <small> or <font size=>
If we wanted our text to be unreadably tiny, we'd have told our browser to display it that way. This one mugs viewers with 20" and 21" screens particularly hard; since most fonts are scaled for 72dpi they're already 30% smaller than they ought to be at 100dpi. Anybody who use these tags for running text should be compressed by 30% themselves, slowly. perhaps this point refers to very small fonts (like this), and so I may agree (anyway, you can see the smallest font I use in the quotation at the beginning;)
but I think even very small fonts can have its purpose (eg. in giving very little relevance to some text);
if it will be hard to read, so it has to be: if you haven't much (or enough) interest you'll give up;
its use in clauses, provisions, and reservation is (I admit) a bit hateful: anyhow you can copy or print that text..


guestbooks
If we have something to say to you, we'll send you mail. Having a guestbook is lame and only demonstrates that the designer is not thinking about what happens when you nudge people to write something, anything. Of course, 75% or more of what guestbooks collect is inane drivel. on this point my disagree is more deep;
there's a big psycological difference between mails and guestbooks;
and the reason maybe just in that they collect "inane drivel": things with little importance cannot be send (pushed), but can be more easily "leaved" in a place (then it'll be the guestbook owner's responsibility to read them);

it seems ESR is a real hacker;
in Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality, JARGON FILE, VERSION 4.2.3, 23 NOV 2000, he says: Hackers have relatively little ability to identify emotionally with other people. This may be because hackers generally aren't much like `other people'.
[..]
As cynical as hackers sometimes wax about the amount of idiocy in the world, they tend by reflex to assume that everyone is as rational, `cool', and imaginative as they consider themselves.
guestbooks aren't for hackers, but for the majority of `other people';
perhaps this also implies that hackers have a deeper sense of responsibility and awareness; unfortunately there are still few of them..

hit counters
"You are the 2,317th visitor to this page." Yeah, like we care. On Yahoo's and Alta Vista's web it takes no effort at all to find and bounce off every page on the planet with a reference to (say) credenzas or toe jam. In this brave new world, hit counters are nothing but a particularly moronic form of ego display, impressing only the lemming-minded. They may tell you how many people got suckered into landing on a glitzy splash page, but they won't even hint how many muttered "losers!" and surfed out again faster than you can say "mouse click". To add injury to insult, hit counters screw up page caching, heaping more load on the Internet's wires.

pages with a reference to somebody say nothing ,or very little, about hits to a page (even a personal page); they say: this guy sounds very interesting for x number of people;
hits from the world gives me a reason and incentive to work on the contents; if I get only, or mostly, hits from my country, I'll avoid translating; otherwise, I'll do... and so on;
hits are a feedback from the outside; and feedbacks are always good;

I agree on the fact that showing a visitor number is useless, and indeed I've chosen an "anonymous" counter;