If I had 5 ‘formatting pets’, they wouldn’t be alive for very long at all. These pet-hates really jingle my bells, push my buttons and get my knickers in a twist.

Before the computer revolutionary-age came about, these formatting-hates of mine would have never existed, simply because it would’ve been too tedious to create them with pen and paper. You see, computers are always the root of the problem. Usually this appears on colloquial blog sites, and over-enthusiastic websites, but lately, I have seen these hideous eye-sores appearing everywhere.

Let’s get things rolling.

1. Excessive use of ellipsis…

   Use open-ended questions such as Why….? How……?

   This is a primo example, not only has the author excessively hit the period key, but the number of periods are inconsistent between. What’s the rule guys? Three dots. And three dots only. Other examples are the lazy bums who are under-enthusiastic and type only 2 dots, and others which as basically out of their mind (or have bad accuracy) and use the comma instead of the dots, eg; ”

   You know,,,

2. Use of exclaims/tildes

   Yay~!~!~!~!~!~!

   The tilde key should be banished from beings used anywhere but in games; it’s good a being a console key, and it should stay that way. The combined usage of the tilde and exclamation marks evokes silliness and visual displeasure. Basically, I put it down to impatient-ness/laziness. To me, it seems that it is the evolved form of:

   Yay!!!!!

   Either people cannot be bothered repeatedly tap the ‘1′ key while holding down ’shift’, or they can be bothered waiting a few micro-seconds until the exclaims repeat itself.

3. Web links at the end of a sentence

   Okay, I think this is going to be a some-what controversial one, but none-the-less, I’ll present you with what I hate.

   Often, you’d see web publishers trying to be cool by incorporating web links into a sentence. For example:

   We’re the best SEO company in the warld! Want to know why? We’re good because we are pro.

   Notice how the period is also formatted as a link? I personally think this is the wrong way to format links — with one exception: unless a whole line of text is formatted as a link. In reality, the incorrect method would be ‘better’ as the user now has a larger surface-area to click the link, but visually, it sucks.

   This is the way it should be done. Watch and learn, folks:

   I am cool, because I know how to correctly format links.

4. Imprecise formatting

   I’d like say that you smell like a lollypop   

   or;

   Hello warld. My name is Benjamin.

   Most commonly discovered on home-brewed newsletters/mail outs, this tops my list as most hated formatting-pet-hate. How can the eye not miss such an atrocious formatting crime. If I were to gain one dollar for every time I saw either one of these mistakes, I’d be a rich man. Unfortunately that’s just hypothetically speaking.

So know you know what I hate, please refrain from doing them. Now pass this knowledge on-to your friends so that we can live in a formatically correct world-wide-web. Thank you.

Photo credit: klevo!