The Idiocy That Is MySpace

*sigh* I just spent the last two hours helping my brother customize the look of his MySpace page and my only conclusion is that the MySpace developers are either idiots, or coding with their hands tied behind their backs, metaphorically speaking.

For example:

• MySpace has the worst site design, usability and intuitiveness-wise, of any site I’ve ever visited. Maybe that’s why teens like it so much. Their parents can’t understand a single thing about it.
• MySpace pages aren’t valid HTML.
• MySpace “HTML” is almost devoid of classes and IDs
• You can’t put your styles into the page’s header. You have to stick a style block inside the “About Me” box, leading to what one site calls FOBUC: “Flash Of Butt-Ugly Content”.
• The # symbol is stripped from all inputted text as an only half-effective block against using CSS to kill the adbox. The same purpose has also lead to an inability to attach CSS to IFrames. This prevents you from linking to an anchor and from styling by ID.
• The preview box doesn’t correctly represent certain CSS-based changes to your page.
• The image upload system checks by extension and refuses .jpeg files as “not PNG, JPEG, or GIF” because they don’t end in butchered .jpg extensions.
• More atrocious behaviour that I know I’m sure forgotten about.

…and through all this, they trumpet the ability to customize your own page. Inconceivable. I could do better in my sleep!

The Idiocy That Is MySpace by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.