[UPDATE: I heard back from Scotty at iDeveloper TV, and he agrees with my gripe; he just hasn't had a chance to get to it, which is understandable given all he does.]

I agree with almost all of John Gruber's piece on web sites that use terrible page titles. For example, I agree that two good formats are

Source: Headline

as in "Cocoa with Love: Version control for solo Mac developers", and

Headline — Source

as in "Lost in China – NYTimes.com" — although I'd be willing to allow other separating punctuation. Unlike Gruber, I like double colons for separating parts of the title, precisely because they don't occur in ordinary prose. (This site uses "»" for that very reason.) I think either "NYTimes.com :: Lost in China" or "Lost in China :: NYTimes.com" would be fine.

For certain sites, I think another acceptable format would be

Headline on Source

as in "CocoaHeads Atlanta May '09: Aaron Hillegass on the Text System on Vimeo". Apple uses yet another format that I think is fine.

Gruber gives several examples of bad titles, but one case he doesn't mention is when a site junks the concept of a page title altogether, and uses the same title for all pages. One example is iDeveloper.tv. As I've said, I like the site. But every page is titled "iDeveloper TV, Training and Tutorials for OS X and iOS Developers".

This is annoying because if I have several tabs displaying pages on the site, it's impossible to tell which tab contains which page without bringing the tab forward and looking at its contents, which defeats the point of displaying the title in the first place.

Also, I like to archive articles in EagleFiler using a hotkey: I press F5 and the article is archived in the background. When an entire site uses one page title, EagleFiler uses that title as the headline of the article, meaning I have to go into EagleFiler and manually paste in the real headline, which takes away much of the convenience of the hotkey.

I sent feedback to iDeveloper.tv. I hope they'll agree and change the site accordingly.