A grouchy note on links to newspaper articles:

For the sake of those of us who:

   
• Use a dialup connection, either at "home" or on the road;
   
• Give a rat's ass about security, particularly Flash graphics and popup windows that evade popup stoppers;
   
• Surf with graphics turned off to keep pages small and advertisers unhappy, but want to read the pieces without struggling with missized graphics boxes;
   
• Want to read long articles on a single page; and/or
   
• Have visual impairments,

please consider making blawg links to articles at notoriously ineptly designed news outlets (the Post, the New York Times, CNN, and the Chicago Tribune being among the worst offenders) point to the "printer friendly" version of the article. If I really need to go back and see a graphic, I can subtract the code from the page right up in the address bar; but I can't necessarily click through directly. You've probably noticed by now that I try to practice what I preach on this issue.

This has been a public service announcement on behalf of the Medicare vision-correction fund that we'll all need if the current generation of "web designers" doesn't get their heads out of their asses.