For those techies who converse with me often, they have likely heard how averse I am to Web page animations. As if the recent YouTube ad blocker countermeasures weren't bad enough, there are three recent additions to their pages which, to me, required fixing with a CSS injector. And I still haven't satisfactorily fixed one of them.
The first and most egregious one I noticed many months ago was animating the like/thumbs up button with a silly burst of colors and confetti. I guess they thought the little hit of domamine one might get from affirming an artist's work wasn't quite enough, and it had to be intensified somehow. Well, that just serves to anger me, like any other CSS eye candy. It's novel for the first couple times it happens, then it becomes unnecessary, distracting dreck much like the vast majority of other Web page animations. In fact, almost always now, I try to position my pointer over the like button with as much pointer obscuring it as practical, so I see as little of that idiocy as possible. In fact, I almost always deliberately look away before clicking it, so that I don't see even the little bit that squirts out around the pointer/cursor. Apparently I'm not alone in disliking this. When I Googled for how to get rid of this, one result was a userscript that would change the appearance (I forget how) to the unselected graphic every 10th of a second (or something like that). As I really want to see whether it is filled in or not, I elected not to add this to my collection full-time. I don't know CSS and/or JavaScript/ECMAScript well enough to prevent it, but I sure do wish I did. This one I'm just grinning and bearing, although it is somewhat difficult to describe to you just how much I loathe and detest it (but yes, I will admit, apparently not enough for me to quit using YouTube altogether).
Similarly, they have somehow thought it is a good idea to animate the like count. They're not all that critical to me, so that is CSS-injection hidden outright. If I want to see it badly enough, I can bring up the enable/disable checkbox list of my chosen CSS injector, and either disable all CSS injection (easier), or just that one rule.
What was the final straw, and therefore the impetus for today's blog post, is the animated colors cycling around the perimeter of the Subscribe button whenever "subscribe" is pronounced in the video. I don't know, and I don't much care, whether the channel artist enables it, or if there are automation conditions for it (like it being in the last N seconds of the video), or if automated voice recognition does it. Any way you slice it, it disgusts me all the same, for some reason even more than typical animations do. That is now killed by CSS injection, and if I want, I can click on the channel's link and subscribe on the channel's page.
English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.
"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!