You might be familiar with the site Web Pages That Suck. It was put together by webguy Vincent Flanders shortly after the web became world-wide, and his goal is to encourage good website design by highlighting bad website design. One pervasive offense in web design is called mystery meat navigation (MMN).
[Sidebar: If the site is run by Vincent Flanders, can’t he just tell us what MMN is? Why the pretense of “Wikipedia says…”? I don’t walk around saying, “According to a predefined subset of the population, I like dogs,” when I can just say, “I like dogs.” It seems like unnecessary horn-tooting. It also seems like the kind of thing one might read about on Language Log….]
Every once in a while, as I blunder around the internet, I stumble across wonderful examples of MMN. This site is the “best” example I’ve seen in a long time. See that 3×6 block of fleurs-de-lis? Those are links. Where do they go? Who knows! They might point to a recipe for brownies, or to a government anti-drug site, or a wikipedia entry for Cody Rhodes. Or, most of them might point to the page itself (Hint: they do).
Brain Ink 
While I like the shout out, I must ask, what the heck are you doing on that crazy fleur de lis website anyhow?
By: Rachel on August 22, 2007
at 8:03 pm
Ya know, I wondered if anyone would point that out… I don’t remember exactly what path led me there. Oftentimes I think the best way to describe my web browsing is something along the lines of “like a blind man at a Wal-Mart (but a Wal-Mart where everything is in identical packages).” Did I just grab toothpaste or tomato soup? Is that a box of tampons in the cart? Who knows! It might just as easily be chili powder, or a tank top, or a box of nails, or a lawn mower.
By: brain on August 22, 2007
at 9:00 pm