Tuesday, August 19, 2008

The Elusive 'Jump'

Notice: This is a rant, however, I have cleverly disguised it as an informative and slightly humorous blogopost.

How many times have you been reading an article, maybe a blogopost, or whathaveyou, and the article said:

More after the jump!

or

Find out, after the jump!

Well, I have news for you. Find out after the jump.







Did you see any jump? DID YOU?! HUH? No? Maybe? Don't know what a jump is?

I'll tell you.

Many, many years ago, there was only one screen resolution, 800x600, anything over that was only for stupid rich people, and anything less was probably what you had, because you suck, and are poor.

Webpages can scroll down many miles, some going into the center of the earth where they can get infected with demonic spyware and explicit hardcore donkey sex ads. After the Stockholm Conventions, where web developers decided to only scroll down to the earth's crust, someone got scared and, not underestimating the stupidity of the human race, worried that maybe humans are so incredibly stupid that they would not realize that the rest of the webpage scrolled down the screen. So they started leaving clues, like making sure a giant picture dribbled down the screen, forcing a scroll, or leaving the helpful:

More, after the jump.

HOWEVER, today is the future, and we have at least 100 resomolutions, and mine is pretty big, the screen is 22 inches for the love of all things sweet and sour. AND YET, never once, has that damn line break, that elusive jump, been at the bottom of the screen where it belongs, nor has it been even on the first screen. I always have to scroll down the page several paragraphs to find a completely useless and somewhat cryptic:

Find out more, after the break.

What the Care Bear screen size do they expect everyone to have? If I had the oh so common 800x600 or even a nice 1024x786, I would have to scroll a good 6 inches to find that stupid and useless misplaced insult to my intelligence.

So just stop, ok? Nobody uses that stupid crap resolution you think they do, nobody is so incredibly stupid that they can't scroll down the screen, and even if they were, you didn't put that 'helpful' hint in the right place, and you wrote it in web developer code, you stupid sqid ink.