I'm tired of lame sites that force me to do their bidding in some particular, arbitrary style. Now that programmers can deploy powerful, fast-working magic to make sites more interactive, let's see them use new techniques--or hey, even old ones--to solve problems that have been around since the dawn of the Web. In 2006, well-behaved sites should:

Work our way. Worst thing on the Web: forms that can handle input only if you type it in precisely the way they want it. Exhibit A is the awful Web site of FedEx, which somehow fancies itself a technology leader. Paste an official account number, complete with two hyphens, into the proper field, and you'll receive an error message--after you fill out the entire page. For some reason, FedEx's programmers remain blissfully unaware that those hyphens appear just about everywhere in FedExland but their domain, so they insist that you enter account numbers as nine consecutive digits.

You know how the dimbulbs responsible for glitches like this will probably use Web 2.0 technology: The very instant you type a prohibited character, the site will pop up a message announcing that your entry is unacceptable (but not exactly why). The right way to deal with this, of course, would be to use programming savvy to strip out the hyphens behind the scenes. Elsewhere, similar logic should accept both 1-2-06 and 01/02/2006 as legitimate date entries. Forcing users to do the formatting instead of writing code to handle it is just plain lazy.

Let us navigate. Excuse me, but after I return to a form via the back or forward button, I want to see what I entered in the first place. I don't want to see the page go blank or revert to some default state. And don't tell me not to use the back button. Just make it work.

Give us help. Microsoft Office uses delay-based help when it shows partial menus but reveals the rest if you take too long to pick an item. That's a terrible implementation, because it's better just to show all the options in the first place. More broadly, the concept of help that appears when you need it has been around since WordStar, and it's still worth pursuing.

Say you spend a long while staring at a Web page; a little balloon might pop up to offer some assistance. But the technique makes sense only if it improves good sites rather than covering up for bad ones. The same goes for tips that appear when you hover over an item--and please, no more of those multiple-level rollover menus, which tend to be as twitchy as an overtightened roller blind.

Do more for us. Google nudges us with a gentle reminder when it thinks we may have mistyped a search term. But some travel sites are totally flummoxed when we make a slight error in entering an airport code. Sorry, but offering to search the entire world is not the logical next step.

Many of the fixes we need most--like the ability to see shipping charges before we get to the very end of a transaction--are a matter of smart design, not newfangled technology. Even so, with the most sophisticated tech yet at their disposal, Web designers have fewer excuses than ever for creating sites that make for annoyance instead of delight.

Contributing Editor Stephen Manes is cohost of PC World's Digital Duo on public television.