|
|
Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 09/22/06 14:26
On Fri, 22 Sep 2006, Jim Higson wrote:
> PDF links? I just middle-click them and read the PDF in a browser
> tab. Very easy.
Well, at least you know how to use your own browser! But some authors
make the mistake of assuming that all browsers are configured to work
the same as their own, so they offer some wholly misleading
instructions on what the user should do. So some naive users end up
in even more confusion than if there were no instructions on the page,
poor things.
One of the original ideas of the web, I think it's fair to say[1], was
that straightforward things would pretty much work intuitively: after
5-10 minutes familiarisation with a new browser, no further
instructions would be needed (of course, users who wanted to do more
complicated things would expect to have to learn how, but that would
be a function of their browser, *not* normally of the page that
they're reading[2]).
So, IMHO, if authors think that their web page needs a whole swath of
instructions on how to use it, then they're probably doing something
wrong. I'd recommend taking a step back and trying to understand why
it's not working intuitively, as it's meant to.
(It goes without saying that variations on "click here" are ipso facto
the mark of an inept web author, n'est-ce pas?)
regards
[1] To save repeating myself, I offer you this item, written long ago
and referring to some of TimBL's early materials on authoring style:
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/alt/alt-more.html#style
[2] ok, there will be special cases where this doesn't apply.
Puzzles, maybe, for example...
Navigation:
[Reply to this message]
|