Who are the geniuses who think that a web site has to use the latest and greatest technology in order to accomplish a basic function? There's nothing I love better than going to some site (like, for example, Bell South's) to test my internet speed, and then to wait a long time for a page to appear to be doing something, and then be informed that the test can't be run because I don't have plug-in "X" installed.

Now plugin X is obviously not required to test an internet connection speed, or to display it, because I can find numerous other sites that will do this for me without requiring a plugin. The poor benighted neanderthals who designed those web sites apparently figured out how to do it with standard HTML, because it seems to work in all my browsers.

Self-indulgent whiz kids who think they're doing us some kind of favor by insisting on bells and whistles on their web sites should ask themselves: how many people visiting their site will be pissed off if they don't encounter a need for zippywhammo plugin "X" on their site? I mean, this isn't http://internetspeedconnectionthemovie.com we're talking about here.

Now, ask how many people who are trying to get their technical question answered, but can't because the poindexters who designed the web sites make them go off and download and install software (on a slow network connection, which is what they're trying to diagnose and fix) before they'll get the answer, will get pissed off?

Think about it, brainiacs.

Welcome to my daily head-ache. Marketing, management, and engineers making technical decisions about technologies that they know nothing about...

apple.com is laid out in a fashion where you can half-guess things.

That is, 'apple.com' is the main site. But there's several sets of tabs to take you further into the 'tree'. A support-tab, quicktime-tab, mac-tab, Mac OS X-tab,.... then there's _sub_ tabs of downloads, etc.

But if you just type 'apple.com' and the word-of-interest in directly, you useually get somewhere. That is: apple.com/support, apple.com/quicktime, apple.com/mac, apple.com/macosx, ... are all live places.

This setup is amazingly useful for such a simple convention. No fancy footwork required.

Unfortunately for most geeks, KISS is something they can only dream of doing with an actual woman as opposed to a design philophsy.

Rand, I tried to think about this "problem" you described, but I didn't have the right plugin.

I love the websites that use Flash for navigation buttons and menus. If you don't have it installed, you can't go anywhere or do anything except go to somone else's site to buy that item you would otherwise have got from them. Dumb.

Plugins should always be optional, never required. Next time you get a site that uses Flash, right-click: note it has an option (not yet implemented - I think) to take control of your webcam, if you have one. At least it has been changed, it used to be on by default. But I would not want some poor site admin dying of heart failure upon viewing my less-than-Adonis self.

And then there are the missing items.

No, not plugins, more basic. Today I wanted to communicate with a certain delivery company about a problem.

Seems only the shipper can do that, not the recipient. You have to sign in to "your" account to fill out their form, and there is no eMail address for ANYTHING. So I ended up having to use the 'phone. At 3AM. But I at least got to talk to a live person, which frankly amazed me.

Actually, this is the result of KISS, not its opposite. It's far simpler for the web developer to always use the same set of plugins everywhere. Newer ones also do more for the developer so using them simplifies his life. You, the customer, don't enter in to the picture.