MySpace: Where HTML Finds Its (Questionable) Roots

Back in the day, when the World Wide Web was young, and HTML was still new on the tongues and fingers of many a web developer, web pages sucked. They looked bad. Bad color combinations. Bad layout. Bad usability. Let's not even talk about accessibility. Back then, it was friggin' cool enough to see a web page render on your screen, click on something, see something else load, and all that with images and text and such. It sure beat terminal graphics on the Legend of Red Dragon door, courtesy of your local BBS! Who needed good looking pages when the thing did what it did, when it did?

Slowly but surely, people woke up to the fact that web pages needed to be more than dancing bears. And, patterns and practices emerged. Navigation across the top or left. Logos that link to the home page. Text that wraps around images in a column. Decent color combinations. Alt text and tab order. In short, people figured out how to make fairly decent looking, usable web sites.

And then came MySpace, and with it came tools to help you customize your MySpace profile. And now we're back to where we started.

Here's apparently how you make the most bestest MySpace profile ever:

1. First, make sure you have a busy, static background image with a color similar to your foreground text. Or, if you'd like, an animated background image will do the trick.
2. Next, fill your profile with lots and lots of animations. More, seriously. Keep adding them. There's no limit.
3. Now, make sure you have plenty of color variations in your text, to ensure people have maximum trouble reading the content that you spent so much time crafting in your profile.
4. To keep people interested, and to think that you're clever, make sure you post some of your latest quiz results for all to see.
5. Finally, if you're concerned that your content isn't up to snuff, just use a font that no one can read. It's OK - that background song will convey your message just fine.

"Aw, come on, George. People are just having fun customizing. It's their space on the 'Net, and they can do what they want, right?"

Hey, I'm all for personalization. But there's a line between personalizing your presence on the Web and making it look plain awful. I consider the Web a source of lots of information (some factual, some opinion, some personal, some funny, some crude). But if the medium with which this information is conveyed involves flashing marquee neon purple text on a dark purple background, songs like The Chicken Dance playing in an endless loop, and an animated cursor trail stating "BCHS 4EVER!!!@!", then count me out.

I wish MySpace would draw some sort of middle ground, with pre-built templates that are customizable to some extent, without letting people delve into the RGB mismatch, static background abyss that is bad Web design. Yes, personalization is cool, but please don't make me want to plug my ears and shield my eyes as a result.