I don’t think this is anything new, and I am sure that others have commented on it before. But why shouldn’t I?

Yesterday I was doing some research for another site I am working on and came across the well known Lorem Ipsum words.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

There has been much debate about the origin of these words. Some claim that they are just gibberish. Others, including The Lipsum Site maintain that they are words from Cicero’s de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (The Extremes of Good and Evil). For most of us, myself included, that would still qualify them as gibberish. Although I did study (perhaps study is putting it too strongly) Latin at school I failed miserably and the words would have made no more sense at the height of my linguistic prowess than they do now.

Whether they are, in fact, a quote from Cicero who apparently wrote them down in 45 BC, or merely made up words, they are nonetheless ubiquitous in the printing world and these days as part of most web site developers’s arsenal.

The words are used as filler. When you design a site you need something to fill in the space to see how your site will look. The beauty of these words is threefold. First, they represent a more or less normal distribution of letters and word lengths so that their appearance is very much that of normal text. Second, a reader is not distracted from the design by the content. And third, you don’t have to make up any gibberish yourself.

The problem is that you have to remember to remove the Lorem Ipsum text and replace it with something a bit more useful before you publish your web pages. And this is something that seems to be forgotten by some developers. The site where I saw it yesterday had it on a page entitled “Disclaimer and other Legal Mumbo Jumbo”. Well, they got that half right. But it is the sort of page that it is easy to put together in a hurry and forget about. And that is what I assumed happened in this case.

I did a Google search of Lorem Ipsum and was rewarded with a result of “about 661,000″ links. Now I didn’t check all of these out – if I can get a government grant to conduct this important research then I would be happy to do so. But I did look at some. There a quite a few, and by that I mean a lot, of sites which are about Lorem Ipsum. So many, in fact, that Cicero could claim to be one of the world’s most successful bloggers. Now that would be an area worthy of a research grant – A Study into the Relative Ranking of Cicero Amongst Bloggers on the World Wide Web.

But a number of sites, and it appeared to be an increasing number as I went further down the rankings, were sites which had obviously forgotten to remove the offending text from their pages. Some sites had obviously been published with the Lorem Ipsum text but have subsequently removed them. But the tell tale sign is still there in the Google search results.

There are myriad traps awaiting the web site developer. This is just another one of the many.