Finally someone says it: "I find his site unreadable. It hurts my eyes." Jakob Nielsen is the Danish-born former Sun employee who gained substantial alpha-geek cred as a Web usability expert in the 1990s — less for his admirable research than for his contempt for graphics-clogged websites. Today, though, Nielsen's dismissal of Ajaxy user generated content comes across as more crank than critic. His own site challenges visitors with a garish yellow-and-white design, pages that lay out too too wide for easy reading (newspapers figured out a long time ago that people prefer to read narrow columns), and a tiresome refusal to use images to convey information and ideas. In short, he's rejected any post-1996 advances in browser capabilities to deliver a better read, bragging instead about his low bandwidth bill. Jakob, why don't you just make us download your essays via FTP? That seems easier.

Contact information for this author is not available.