Menus

Not restaurant ones, computer ones. To be more specific, shit computer ones off the internet. And most especially, FUCKING STUPID shit computer ones off the internet that not only don't work but stop everything else working too because they were implemented by a bunch of GIGANTIC FLAMING FUCKING IDIOTS.

There should be some text and
images and shit but all we get is
this vile coloured emptiness

Because some stupid fucking
cunt has made it do that on purpose.

To take just one example: today I followed a link posted by someone who didn't understand some bit of British popular culture (turned out I didn't either, but that's by the by). The destination website, however, turned out to be unreadable. Instead of seeing some text and images and shit like I was expecting to, all I got was a blank screen in a lysergically disgusting colour, as shown on the right.

Inspecting the page with the browser's debugger revealed the reason: some mindless dribbling fucking cunt has deliberately created a DIV that sits immovably on top of everything else and fills the entire fucking screen. It looks like it's supposed to be a menu, but there's fuck all actually in it, and in any case content or no content there is no fucking excuse for making the sodding thing blank out the entire fucking screen so you can't fucking read the fucking website.

Simply deleting the node solved the problem and made the website readable. It then turned out that it hadn't been worth reading anyway (all fucking videos, no transcripts, fucksake I want TEXT not this video shite), but that's not the point of this rant.

But what's really fucking annoying is it isn't just this one crappy website. This sort of stupid fucking shit happens all the fucking time these days. As can be seen from the debugger screenshot, the site concerned is a Wordpress site. It's almost universal for Wordpress sites to do this kind of stupid shite these days: Wordpress is fucking useless because sites made with it do not fucking work. Never mind the constant flow of vulnerabilities; they just make it a bad idea, but having stuff deliberately included in it that makes sites not fucking work makes it a fucking useless idea. And there is such an arse-stretchingly immense shitpile of fucking stupid things that make sites not work in it that it's very hard to write a single universal client-side Wordpress-fixing script to take out all the different kinds of stupid.

Nor is it by any means limited to Wordpress. Mindbuggeringly moronic menus masking the content, and other equally stupid shit that has the same effect, are so fucking common these days you'd think that people were actually asking for websites that won't let you cunting read anything. I'm sick to the bloody bollocks of having to open up the debugger and delete stupid nodes that are deliberately set up to hide the content before I can fucking read anything. And I'm sick to the bloody bollocks of having to write yetableedingnother client-side script or CSS fragment to get rid of the stupid fucking things automatically if I want to read more than a couple of different pages on the site.

Shitting penises, for fuck's sake. LOOK. THIS is how you do a fucking menu: (No, none of it does anything, it's just for show...)

Notice the following IMPORTANT SHIT:

• The popup hovery bits GO AWAY BY THEMSELVES and AREN'T THERE WHEN YOU'RE NOT USING THEM. They do not hang around like a turd that won't drop getting in the fucking way of everything else.
• Also, they are a SENSIBLE SIZE. They are only big enough to contain the text that's in them. They don't fill the entire bleeding screen just to show a handful of letters like a North Korean supermarket.
• Indeed, the whole fucking thing is a sensible size. It only takes up its own line. So the very idea of it blanking out the entire fucking screen makes no sense. It just fits neatly at the top of the page (or half way down it in this case) being there but not getting in the way, and scrolling neatly off the screen when you scroll down. (Or if you must insist on doing position: fixed at least it's still small enough not to be a fucking pain in the arse.)
• And it goes across, not up and down the side which is a shite place to put a menu unless you're going to use a frameset or the CSS equivalent to keep it under control, which no fucker ever fucking does any more. Instead they make them stick out from the left over the top of the actual content, which to be sure usually only blanks out about half of it, but that isn't a lot less shit than blanking out the whole sodding lot.
• It's all done in CSS. It does not use any fucking javascript. 99+% of every fucking thing that doesn't work on websites is because some stupid shithead has tried to do something in javascript (usually something that can be done perfectly well without javascript if the shithead could actually think for themselves about what they're supposed to be doing instead of copy-and-pasting recipes like a fucking dunce) and the flaming javascript doesn't bastarding cuntfaced arse biscuiting work. So STOP FUCKING USING IT you shiteing cunts.
• It uses a plain > to symbolise the existence of a submenu instead of whatever fucking pointless cutesy shite has been added to Unicode in the last 5 minutes so all you see is a little box with some tiny numbers in it and you have to look the fucker up to see what the stupid gits are trying to do and it turns out there's some perfectly ordinary thing that's been standard for 50 years that they could have used instead just like everyone used to before all this hideous swarm of morons started infesting the place and always doing everything in the most stupid possible manner for no fucking reason at all.

Fucksake if you can't work it out for yourself feel free to copy the source code of this page. Note that the spaces at the beginning and end of the content of the LI elements are required, because if you don't have them then you do get spaces appearing in the menu and fucking it up. If you do put spaces in, you don't get spaces coming out. There are a shitload of clever tricks to try and stop this happening but none of them fucking work, and of the blunt-instrument approaches this is the least horrible and the only one that actually makes the code more readable than not using it. The CSS all scales off the font size, so start by setting the font size on the .menu class and then work down fucking about with margins and backgrounds and shit as appropriate.

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