I was watching Chemistry: A Volatile History and the presenter Jim Al-Khalili spoke about one of the greatest red herrings in science which was phlogiston. A theory that fire element called “phlogiston” was given off when substances burned. So when wood burned it became ash and an invisible element had been given off phlogiston, as the ash was lighter than the wood. Apparently the pursuit of this scientific theory derailed chemists for a hundred years or so.

Its the sort of thing that makes you very wary of web design conventions. That in the current world of design patterns, and components, and reuse, theese things seem very sensible. Conventions become standards, everyone adopts them. As a fan of design patterns I felt the example of phlogiston was a flag to be wary of conventions.

In my own experience, I can remember being very taken with the New York times content slider which was placed above the footer. It is a series of text and images from elsewhere on the site, to improve recirculation. So I included it in a number of sites I designed. But the click through was poor and the developers always complained of the extra page weight. So eventually it was dropped on some of the sites. Meanwhile it became a very common trend across a lot of editorial based websites.