OT: web design

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 10:39:26PM -0500, Brian K. White wrote:
> Dumb thing #1 that people do who disregard common sense of simplicity
> in web design: When you follow a link, something about the new page
> makes the back button unuseable. You just keep getting the new
> page over and over again due to some kind of immediate redirect or
> something. It doesn't matter that you have no difficulty displaying
> the new page. The unecessary gizmo on it is still a problem when you
> can't get back to, say, the google search results you came from.

Yup; the dreaded 0-second redirect.  You can, of course, pull-down the
back-button *menu*, and go back 2 pages.

> The answer there is, once you have been burned by this once, you start
> being paranoid and every time you want to follow a link but value the
> current page enough to worry about losing it, you right-click on the
> link and choose open in new window or in new tab (for those browsers
> that have tabs).
>
> This brings us to Dumb thing #2: Use of flash. Remember, I have
> flash. It works fine. I don't even mind using it. I love those little
> (usually funny) movies people make. It's like a new art form and I
> think it's great because some people are really clever and creative
> with it. So this article I was talking about above has this stack of
> ads I am interested in. 3/4 of the ads are flash animations, and the
> content could have been animated gif and look the same.
>
> The flash ads can not be right-clicked on in order to open in new
> window. When you right-click on them, you only get a menu from the
> flash player with a few options and help/about for the flash pugin
> instead of the right-click menu from the browser. This means you have
> no way to safely open the link in a new window. All you can do is
> follow the link normally, and hope it's not one of those sites that
> traps you. Great. Guess which sites I never went to?

I've found, with FireFox at least, that *control-*clicking on such
links does seem to work correctly in most cases, bringing them up in a
new tab.

> Every "new" thing must have many such indirect problems. I certainly
> couldn't think of them all ahead of time, and clearly many web
> designers haven't either. That's why it's better to default to not
> using them instead of defaulting to using them.

Indeed.

But the question, as always, is, "on whose side is this a training
issue?"  :-)

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

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