Posted by David Segall on 09/22/06 15:04

"Alan J. Flavell" <flavell@physics.gla.ac.uk> wrote:

>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...

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