Posted by Harlan Messinger on 10/20/06 13:14

Paul Jones wrote:
> nagasaki mike wrote:
>
>> pardon my ignorance but what do you mean by a 'download button'? why not
>> just have a normal link to the mp3, they left-click it says open or save -
>> they choose save (or maybe open, who knows how they feel) job done. isnt it?
>
> Well, not really. What we have is a list of 15 tracks each with three
> icons to the left. The first is a listen icon (depicted by a
> semi-quaver) which plays the song in the same html page - I've now got
> this working. The third is a lyrics icon (depicted by a page icon) -
> this was never a problem. The second is a save icon (depicted by a
> floppy disc icon). This seems nigh-on impossible to implement. As a
> result, we've gone for bringing up an alert message when this icon is
> clicked, which tells users words to the effect that they have to
> right-click to save and will probably now be taken somewhere that we
> can't predict and so they will have click the back button on their
> browser to get back to what they were doing.

I think you're looking at this from the wrong perspective. From *your*
perspective, there's a perplexing number of possible ways the download
might work on the user's end. From the user's perspective, it works the
same way every time on his computer, and he already *knows* what that
is. Just let him do what he's already used to doing, whatever that is,
instead of trying to make it work *one* way, *your* way, which may not
be that the user is familiar with at all.

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