If you want to get generally depressed at the state of the web, have a look at the Calvin And Hobbes page. For a start - knowing about Bill Watterson's views on comics as an art from, and not degrading them with mechandise deals - I can only assume he doesn't know about this site, or is contractually obliged to allow it, because he would be incensed: it's covered in animated banner adverts (frequently for services like Mate1 - completely inappropriate for a child-friendly comic), fake "you're our millionth visitor!" prizes, spyware-laden smileys and screensavers, and the worst web-innovation of the decade: pop-ups and pop-unders (actually I don't see these, but Firefox told me it blocked four of them for the single page). Frankly it has every appearance that like I've accidentally stumbled onto the seedier portion of the internet, as though the Universal Press Syndicate had forgotten to pay their domain renewal fees and the page got taken over by cybersquatting low-life.

But none of that is new, so it isn't why I'm posting. What's new is something you probably won't see at first glance, unless you happen to be using Linux becuase cross-platform compatibilty is so overrated these days. You see, the comic itself, a static (usually black-and-white) image, is no longer served as the image file it appears to be. Instead it is a Shockwave Flash Animation. And not only that, it is one which apparently requires version 8 of the player! And that doesn't exist for Linux (yet).

It's bad anyway, even on MacOS where the picture works, because it only seems to load the image when the page is visibly shown. So if (in my usual habit) I middle-click to open a new background tab with the various comics pages, and I switch to each tab when it has apparently finished loading, then there's still a wait of a couple of seconds while the picture loads. Somebody, somewhere has managed to seed the meme that annoying your audience is a good business tactic...