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Jakob Nielsen has been saying that ads on the net don't work since 1997. And he's right.

Furthermore ad stripping software like Adsubtract stop your browser from even asking for the ads.

It's only matter of time until people realize that those banner ads are sucking down the bandwith on their poor 56k modems. Once they find they can surf faster without the ads, it'll spead faster than All-Advantage...
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users have started equating such designs with advertising which they routinely ignore. These days, it is extremely important for any content and navigation elements to look very different than prevailing advertising designs since users tune out anything that they don't think will be relevant to their task.

An example of this is I went to download a program and couldn't find it because the only link to download was a flashy graphic. I spent 5 minutes looking for the text that said "download" but didn't see the big graphical link saying "download for free" right at the top. This was iTunes, by the way, on Apple's site. I couldn't believe they made such a big mistake.

People just filter anything resembling an ad out as a matter of course. If advertisers were smart they would design oddly shaped static and text based ads to get people to pay more attention to them. So yeah, advertisers should target more, but they need to be a little smarter about the way ads are designed too.

By the way, did anyone else have the same problem finding the download link? The two other people I sent to the site had a hard time finding it too.

I have to say, though, I've seen people walking down the street talking into their earpieces, and I'm having a hard time adjusting to the sight. Maybe we'll get used to that sight after time, though.

This sounds like Jakob Nielsen's idea of micropayments. I'm not sure if Jakob ever considered aggregate charges, though.

Basically, ISP's already do what the author is suggesting as the charge users for the aggregate of the bandwidth they use. To pay for content, ISP's would most likely have to double the charge to the user. Obviously that is not going to happen any time soon.

It is a fundamentally good idea, but there are several logistical and economic issues which make it extremely difficult to implement.

When was the last time some type of service like this wasn't hacked apart?

The only way this will work is voluntary, and for obvious reasons this does not work real well, check www.fairtunes.com to see how few people have actually "tipped" their favorite artists.

Dr. Jakob Neilsen has alot of interesting things to say about micropayments, but take it with a grain of salt because "In an ideal world" there would be no need for money."

• Read Macromedia's own Top 10 Usability Tips for Flash Web Sites to quickly learn how to make your Flash site at least ten times better than the average Flash website.
• Read WebWord's Flash Usability Challenge , co-sponsored by myself, in which a ransom is offered to find a Flash site that is suitable enough for e-commerce to actually make money.
• Read Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox column Flash: 99% Bad for an expert opinion on how Flash makes websites unusable for the average user.

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Remember, people follow links because they want something on your site: the best possible introduction and more valuable than any advertising for attracting new customers.

Charging for them is definitely missing the point ...

I'm looking into buying a new mobile phone (in North America) with a good WAP browser, internet access, and the general spiffy phone features.

WAP is terrible. It's slow, the gateways are unreliable, screens are too small... And if you're wanting to do real show-off things like check your Yahoo Mail account, realize that filling in a username/password on a WML form is a very trying exercise.

Check out Jakob Neilson's WAP Field Study. Look at the times to accomplish simple tasks with WAP.

I purchased a Nokia 7110 six months ago, and never bothered using the WAP features after the first couple of days. It collects dust on my shelf now, replaced by a (non-WAP) 8890 that is much more stylish, can stay comfortably in my front pocket while I'm sitting down, and works nearly anywhere on the planet that cellular service is available.

Get a phone that's just a phone. If you really want wireless 'net access, get a Palm Vx and a Minstrel.

A while ago, a couple people mentioned that someone had taken my domain name and was selling it. It turns out that, not being pronouncable, PRJC is a common misspelling, and these bastards are squatting on it, along with nearly every other imaginable combination of four letters. I sent them an email asking if they'd be willing to sell PRJC, thinking maybe I'd throw $100 or maybe even $200 at it... more than ten times what they probably paid for it in their bulk purchasing. They wanted $2000. They were willing to entertain "reasonable" offers, which more or less means four digits.

Lately, I've been doing a little bit of looking at the web logs, and it looks like the traffic comes from more or less three places:

• Search Engines: vast majority of visitors leave quickly
• Links: this how people who really are interested in the site usually find us
• Archiver Programs: a lot of people run programs like Teleport Pro to grab a complete copy of the site

In the last several months, we've started selling parts, circuit boards and kits for a couple the projects, and it certainly seems like the best way to spend money to promote the site is with an affiliate program. I'll probably end up doing a bit of cgi coding sometime in the next several months and add something like this. Even if we end up sending out $100/month (if we actually sold enough stuff in a month to pay that much, I could quit my day job and work on the web site full time!).... that'd be a lot better use of money than giving it to those damn squatters.

So, dear reader, if you've got any experience setting up one of these affiliate programs or you've had good or bad experience participating in them, please drop me a message with your experiences.

...and then goes on about social isolation, seeking social interaction on-line, etc, laced with stereotypes.

Some time ago I read an alertbox column which had an interesting point about gui interfaces (tried for about 15 minutes to locate it again... it's in there somewhere).

Jakob describes the early non-gui interfaces (eg. unix) as "black caves". The user needs to form a mental image in their mind of the the directories, files, and other resources, and then type commands to operate on them with little or no on-screen information, in much the same way you'd have to navigate through a black cave, keeping a mental picture of where you are. He claims the early computer interfaces worked well for engineers, because of their superior ability to form mental models, but ended up being worthless for ordinary users.

Indeed, D & D appeals to people who naturally have this ability to form mental models. Perhaps playing D & D helps one learn and improve their ability to form mental models. I believe the more likely scenario is that the game has a fairly high barrier to entry, in terms of using mental models and imagination, and at least to start playing and enjoy it enough to continue, you either have it or you don't. Considerable time spent playing probably improves one's mental modeling abilities, much like experience using non-gui computer interfaces, but to get started and actually enjoy the game, as a player or DM, you really need to have that ability to envision the D & D world.

Programming computers is certainly a persuit which requires forming mental models. Programming does involve some work to compose the code, and learning to do this is similar to the effort required to learn a natual language, though computer languages are much simpler and have a very limited vocabulary. I believe it is this natural ability for form mental models which makes programming fun for some (whom you refer to as "nerds"), where for most people it seems like very hard work.

Frederick P Brooks writes in The Mythical Man-Month:

...there is a delight of working in such a tractable medium. The Programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.

Perhaps imagination and mental models are a skill, of maybe it's inate, wired into ones brain from the beginning. Those who have it seem to have it much much moreso that those how have little or none. This ability is the key element that makes programming and role playing fun and interesting, and for the majority of the population without these abilities of mental modeling and a lack of imagination, programming seems like drudgery and D & D seems like a waste of time.

BTW: the movies still sucks.

accessibility is a good idea, since i have heard things about agencies getting sued for not being ADA compliant. As far as content goes, I would advise you to look into XML/XSLT for seperating your content and presentation. You can effectively build an information architecture using XML, and you can style it with XSLT. This is useful if you have multiple views of your data (snazzy dhtml/html based, Handheld based, PDF, ADA compliant [i.e. no frames with an shitload of alt tags]). As far as layout and design goes, i suggest you consult works by Jacob Niesen. He is a little overated (and overpaid) in my opinion, but he has decent ideas now and again. Good luck

Before you start, determine your purpose and your audience: what do you want to communicate, and with whom?

Some suggestions:

• First, meet with management to determine what they want to communicate, and with whom they believe they will be communicating. (if they don't want to meet with you, run like hell and find a different project).
• Next, meet with a group of customers. You don't mention whether you're designing for a local government agency, something statewide, something federal, a UN agency, a provincial government not in the US, or whatever; but your customer is the person who either receives services from your agency or is required to pay your agency directly, whether your agency renders services or not. Meet one-on-one and with small groups of your customers to discover what they expect from your agency, and by extension, your agency's website. Take lots of notes.
• Evaluate how managements' and customers' views differ and complement one another. Write a project scope that accounts for these, including detailed explanations for features and design elements that management has not requested. be sure to include reasonable estimates of the time and cost involved in developing the project within the scope you have envisioned.
• Receive written management approval for your project scope and budget before proceeding.

Don't start coding yet:

• Draw a document hierarchy for your site. This can be done with pencil and paper, with Visio, whatever. But establish the relationships among the areas of the website before you make coding decisions.
• Sketch or mockup with a graphics tool the general look of your home page, index pages, content pages, form pages, etc.
• Receive written management approval for your hierarchy and visual design before proceeding.

Now it's time to choose your platform.

• Choose your platform wisely. Whether the site's going to be built from static HTML, upon an open source platform like Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL, with a commercial product like NT, IIS, ASP, and SQL7, or in some combination, be sure your choice will meet the established scope and objectives -- and stay within budget.
• Don't choose a product because "that's what Department CYA is using." Every project is different.

Think you're ready to write some code? Not yet:

• Read Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen. Feel free to disagree with some of his conclusions.
• Read Web by Design: The Complete Guide by Molly Holzschlag. Feel free to disagree with some of her conclusions.

Okay. Now you can write code:

• Write vendor-neutral, standards-compliant HTML.
• Separate presentation from content.
• Follow the rules you've learned from Molly and Jakob.

Good Luck!

Jakob Nielsen wrote an article in September 2000 discussing 'regulatory usability', about the need for increased comprehendability (my word) in the plethora of legal nonsense we have to wade through.

He particularly mentions EULA and disclaimers at the end of the article, stating:

From usability studies, we know that users almost never bother to read legal documents when they come across them on a website. People just click the I Accept button without even glancing at the text. Since everybody knows that users don't read these agreements, it is interesting whether they will even hold up in court.

I will be very interested how an EULA holds up in court when (not if) the day comes. Full article here...

The guru of Web usability got the title through being right a lot. Check out his website and buy his book, Designing Web Usability.

There may be a whole load of specific issues to consider, but on the general issue of making a website that people can stand to use, he's your man.
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Having worked so much on my personal pages, and having seen others that are really great, it's a bit distubing to hear an attitude like "all of the best of the Internet ... NO porn or personal websites".

There certainly are a lot of cases of personal sites that are arguably better than a good portion of their commercial counterparts. Phil's Photo.net comes easily to mind. Jakob Nielsen's Useit.com is probably another well known example. How about mp3projects.com, which is hosted on freeservers.com.

So I'm wondering what is it, exactly, that makes a personal website, well, a personal site that they're above indexing?

• Contact info for the author, instead of a generic webmaster@ ??
• Having the tilde ("~") in the URL?
• Authored by a real person who cared instead of a by-the-hour web consulting firm?
• Not selling any products?
• Not being a company or institution (w/ a logo)?
• A main page lacking over-done graphical design and/or flash-based intro?
• Black-n-Yellow "Under Construction" signs?

Still, the attitude expressed about personal websites is a bit disturbing. You'd think folks building an index of the net would know a bit more about some the truely great personal sites.

However, the WAP Usability Report which you can purchase for download from useit.com (which is an excellent site for learning how to write good websites) says that people just don't like WAP.

From the report summary:

When users were asked whether they were likely to use a WAP phone within one year, a resounding 70% answered no. WAP is not ready for prime time yet, nor do users expect it to be usable any time soon. Remember, this finding comes after respondents had used WAP services for a week, so their conclusions are significantly more valid than answers from focus group participants who are simply asked to speculate about whether they would like WAP. We surveyed people who had suffered through the painful experience of using WAP, and they definitely didn't like it.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

Actually this already exists to an extent with LINK REL

The Dancing Jakob Nielsen wrote a short paper on its implementation in iCab.

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Lets see how complicated a simple procedure can be made... should we add machines with levers to pull and switches to set, votomatic machines which you put the card in, then punch through the circle the little arrow points to? Too many things to break down or confuse people in my opinion. Pencil and paper offers a couple of big advantages: people are used to using these devices, and there's no hidden machinery going wrong in the background. Adding more technology (whether computers or mechanical machines) at the moment of voting seems like asking for trouble.

Read this from the world's foremost usability expert:

2D is better than 3D

It isn't confusing at all. Not at all. The only people who are responsible for the problem are the people who couldn't follow simple instructions and take the time to look at what they were doing.

So you say. Expert testimony says otherwise. Jakob Nielsen:

The Florida ballot clearly had usability problems, caused by the attempt to map a two-column set of labels onto a one-column action area. A direct mapping between two single-column areas would have been much less error-prone.

Nielsen doesn't go so far as to say that this is specifcally what cost Gore the election, but with 19K incorrectly filled out ballots in two counties, I'd say it's a pretty fair guess.

Additionally, from Dan Bricklin:

You can see pictures of the ballot on the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Election's web site ... What isn't obvious from these pictures is exactly how the ballots aligned with the holes in real machines. Boston.com has an AP picture that shows one situation without the card but a real holder. The artist's conception many others are showing doesn't look as realistic.

See September 15, 2000

Jakob Nielsen is the world's foremost expert on software and web usability.

He links to this Scott Rosenberg Salon.com article for more.

Bad cat.

• a high-end user's connection speed grows by 50% per year
• you don't get to use this added bandwidth to make your Web pages larger until 2003

We can credit W3C for being forward-looking, but I expect that CSSMP will go the way of WAP.

Perhaps not. I believe the point of this newly crafted subset of CSS2 is to provide a stable reference for useful functions that ought to be in mobile devices (meaning ultra-portable devices with limited display capabilities, and not meaning laptops which might have better display capabilities than many quite old desktop computer layouts with small VGA monitors which are still in use throughout the world).

This area is of keen interest to me, and after the long agony with simple HTML 3.2/4.0[1]+ and with CSS1 through the still not-quite-totally-there CSS2, any way to avoid any more standards wrangling will come as a great relief to those of us who have to actually do this stuff for a living. I'd imagine that XSLT 1.0+ engines will do much of the actual work, and it really helps to be able to more or less reuse all that existing work with a near-exact subset of CSS2.

Anyways, I'm back (in a few minutes, after a little more procrastination) to figuring out how to most efficiently split up parts of (simple for now) XML documents for later Java/Python XML/XSLT processing, while allowing simpler, more immediate PHP 4.0+ XML processing. Argh ....

There are a lot of bulletin boards around the Net that act very much like a virtual community. I have plenty of people who I only know on the Net and we converse on a regular basis. Some of my best friends I know through the Net. Also, Jon Katz, you could learn a thing or two from Jakob Nielsen.

Jakob Nielsen took on mobile devices and phone combos in his latest alertbox article. He says a numeric keypad is Bad(tm) whereas the Palm interface is Good(tm).

Here is an interesting article on security methods, from a user-interface design perspective. Maximum Security

Here's a quote to whet your appetite:
Security in our nation's computer systems is in trouble, and the fault lies with an education system turning out security people unprepared to build real-world secure systems. As a result, many of our most secure-appearing systems sport all the impenetrability of a slice of Swiss Cheese.

(BTW: I recommend looking through AskTog and Alertbox if you deal at all with interface design, or want to know why today's interfaces suck so much sometimes :)
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D. Fischer

Here is a link to a prescient column by Jakob Nielsen: Profit Maximization vs. User Loyalty

The entire thing is worth reading, but here is a good quote: "Even though standard economic theory says that you should employ [differential pricing] strategies, I warn against them due to their impact on user loyalty."
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D. Fischer

I don't care about personalization (contrary to what Microsoft says I *should* care about), I don't care about targetted e-mail, targetted advertising (contrary to what *sigh* even my beloved TIVO thinks) I care about the lowest price.

Glenn Fleishman runs a price comparison site. He says that, after a comparison, people very often choose to buy from Amazon even if they have the higher price.
__

Jakob Nielson, usability expert and author of the Alertbox Column, which many highly regard, wrote this little piece about tradeoffs between differential pricing and user loyalty. Probably an interesting read, even if you don't always agree with Nielson's opinions.

Jakob Nielson, usability expert and author of the Alertbox Column, which many highly regard, wrote this little piece about tradeoffs between differential pricing and user loyalty. Probably an interesting read, even if you don't always agree with Nielson's opinions.

• Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox -- WAP Backlash
  
• The Harm of the Wireless Application Protocol (patents inhibiting WAP and some good anti-WAP links)
  
  • The WAP Trap
    
  • WAP - The Patent Problem
    
  • W* Effect Considered Harmful
    
  • Attacks Against The WAP WTLS Protocol
    
  • Underwhelmed by WAP - Impressions from the coalface
    
  • WAP Lash
    
• It really stands for 'What a Pain'
  

  
  
  The issues raised include:

  • WAP isn't patent free
  • Not an open standard ($27000 entrance fee)
  • WAP reinvents a large part of open internet standards, resulting in immature protocols with the associated security problems
  • WAP aims for the lowest common denominator rather than allowing for growth in mobile web browsing

See:

Profit Maximization vs. User Loyalty

-Jeff

Prescience: this is exactly what Jakob Nielsen warned vendors against back in March: see the appropriate Alertbox.

example quote:

It is also very easy to plot a product's price elasticity curve on the Web: randomly serve up pages with different prices to the first thousand users or so who visit a given product page and measure how many buy at each of the price points. With this information, profits can be maximized by multiplying the profit margins and their corresponding conversion rates and picking the price that comes out best.

See Jakob Nielsen's July 9 column, WAP Backlash.

There is real value in the vision held by many of the cellular providers, but we are a long way from that vision. The vision requires:

Better user interfaces. Doh! We will not triple-tap our way to http://wap.somehorrendouslylong.url.com.

Displays big enough to read and display useful graphics (not video, just maps and such).

GPS integration.

The idea is that when my Bridgestone/Firestone Tires of Death shred themselves, I can whip out my phone and get directions to the nearest service station, then locate the closest Starbuck's for a cup of coffee while they're replaced.

But we're a long way from that.

I've been watching with some amusement as American companies scramble to come up with WAP strategies. In general, these strategies have two key components:

Exclusivity, reflecting the "false Internet" nature of the so-called Wireless Web. If you're on the screen, you're on. If you're off the screen, you're dead. The telephone company owns the screen. Pay up, information providers, or miss out on the Next Big Thing. But nobody really knows whether this next thing is big. Where's the money for the information provider?

Weak content planning, generally spun out of the "we have all this great content, let's give it to them" school of thought rather than the "let's understand what a wireless consumer might need" school of thought. Some newspaper people, for instance, are talking about how great it would be to put classified ads on WAP. I don't think I am going to sit in the park and read the classifieds on my phone.

1. the fact that Linux competes strongly against Windows, which ESR himself describes with the words "shit on ice", doesn't automatically mean that Linux is better than the Mac OS. . after all, the "shit on ice" OS ate Apple's lunch because it had a huge market channel, complements of Microsoft's early ally IBM.

Linux also has a huge market channel. . the whole point of open source is to eliminate barriers between code and the people who want to use it. . by those standards, it's hardly surprising that Linux has picked up a good share of the market.

the fact that Linux is cutting into the Windows market share faster than the Mac OS doesn't necessarily imply that Linux is better than the Mac OS, it just says that Linux is less of a "shit on ice" OS than Windows. when Linux starts eating *Apple's* market share, comparisons between the two products will be valid.

2. competing Linux desktop standards aren't automatically a good thing.

portability has always been one of the great strengths of unix-based operating systems. . a piece of code written for one platform can move effortlessly to a wide range of other platforms. . Metcalfe's law says that the value of the network increases with the square of its size, and easy porting makes it easy to expand the unix network.

to the best of my knowledge, the Linux desktop systems aren't so portable. . Gnome needs Gnome apps, KDE needs KDE apps, and so on. . what this does is fragment the unix network, and run Metcalfe's Law in reverse.

3. a single Linux desktop standard isn't automatically a good thing.

GUI programming is hard work. . creating a whole environment of mutually compatible GUI apps is even more work. . learning the APIs that support the GUI and make programs compatible with the general environment is a long, slow process, and the older those APIs get, the longer and slower it is.

meanwhile, one of the reasons that Linux is every programmer's friend is that it's easy to code. . the command line is a *much* friendlier programming environment, because you can just whack out some code and go. . whenever an OS reaches the point that you have to spend three weeks reading manuals just to get "hello, world." to run as a standalone application, that effort curve drives programmers back to some other CLI environment. . Windows programmers used the DOS shell, for instance, instead of climbing onto the Windows treadmill.

a single desktop standard for Linux could, at least potentially, turn into nothing more than an Open Source version of that same treadmill.

myself, i'm not sure whether the Linux development (and community) model can handle the problems of GUI development at all. . i'm not trying to slam anyone. . i just think there are some serious issues that need to be addressed, and the anything-goes nature of the Linux model seems to offer as many new problems as it does solutions.

Not exactly real numbers, but a study on kids using the web which I found through Jakob Nielsen's site found that many just tuned the ads out (details under Behavioral Observations).

The problem of making a living providing free content or services on the web is pretty much the same as figuring out how to make a living writing free software. Even the most altruistic programmer, writer, artist, or musician still has to put food on the table and pay the bills.

Micropayments, despite the support they get from web gurus like Jakob Nielsen, would probably kill off most web sites. Imagine how popular TV would be if you had to pay a nickle every time you flipped channels or a new show came on. Wide-scale micropayments for general content would kill the web -- people would get sick of being nickeled & dimed to death very quickly. Like broadcast television, most web content will continue to be advertiser-supported for the forseeable future.

This is not to say that micropayments are a bad idea -- they do have their place. Reusable electronic content like MP-3's or video clips are obvious candidates for a micropayment system.

Besides advertising and micropayments, the only other really viable method for generating revinue for content producers is a subscription model. Red Hat is a good example of a subscription web site -- paid subscribers get access to their priority FTP web servers. You can get the same content from the public servers, but the priority servers let you get it faster and you get tech support if you have problems with the stuff you download. In order for a subscription web site to be successful, it must do two things: offer substantial free (probably advertiser-supported) content, and offer paid subscribers a tangible premium (no ads, faster servers, tech support, etc.) Subscriber-only content is generally a bad idea; if a prospective subscriber can't get a pretty complete picture of the content the site offers, there is no real incentive for him to become a subscriber - particuarly if you have a competitor that offers similar content for free.

"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

I take offense at this author's description of usability as a "feature." It does a great disservice to the champions of usable software systems to encourage the belief that usability can be added in the same way that reverse-alphabetical file listings can be added.
Usability is a fundamental issue that permeates a system's design. It's just as important to consider what the system will try NOT to do as it is to plan what it will do. I don't want my thermostat turning my lights on and off, even if it does contain a convenient timing circuit. It is very very difficult to take an existing system and "make it usable".
Creating something usable involves repeated evaluations by end users, and a willingness to pay attention to what your usability studies show. Developers are not valid users for this purpose. I'm really glad to see companies like Eazel that purport to be doing end user testing. Until the open source community starts paying attention to feedback from people other than developers, it will create software that only developers can use. And wasn't part of the idea to create better sofware for everyone ?

This is a rehash of arguments more elegantly stated at http://www.useit.com, which discusses usability issues.

Maybe this will convince the developers of the various GTK/Qt/Motif/etc. GUI programs to consider screen sizes smaller than 1024 x 768.

Jakob Neilsen's Alertbox column has been talking about the need to consider screen size on handhelds and WAP devices. He's talking primarily about Web applications, but it'll be true for any portable apps.

Developers for handhelds and devices with touch screens will also have to consider that users are more likely to click/tap widgets then drag/scroll them.

Jay (=

I think gnutella would really profit from a reputation manager as preached by Jakob Nielsen.

Spam floats to the bottom. Quality servers float to the top.

Just a thought

I think gnutella would really profit from a reputation manager as preached by Jakob Nielsen.

Spam floats to the bottom. Quality servers float to the top.

Just a thought

Check Jacob Nielsen's web site, he is one of the authors of the AntiMac Interface original paper.

www.useit.com

He is one of the "masters of usability" and he has been publishing weekly articles for a long time centered on Internet design. Reading them can be a great help whenever you have to publish something.

Fh

Mozilla does not handle the title attribute of the anchor tag in any appreciable way. All of the links on my homepage have a title="" attribute meant to give an additional description for people with accesibility browsers (who wants to hear "ach-tee-tee-pee-colon .." every time their browser selects a link?). The Alertbox (a web usability column I read) also uses these tags to make the browsing experience easier.

I'm sure I could find more tags that Mozilla fails to support/implement properly, but I don't have a "test suite" handy.. although I'm assuming someone will write one soon (I might event take a stab at it).
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Browsers are just horrible. Why? No one implements the standards properly. And once a company manages to get a lead in their market share, they ignore the fact that their browsers are broken by design, and add features that the marketting department orders.

The Day the Browser Died by Jeffery Zeldman illustrates quite nicely how this happened with Netscape v4, which fails to support CSS very well at all (IIRC, it turns CSS into some sort of Javascript style page stuff).

People have never had much choice when it came to web browsers. In the early days, it was Netscape or Mosaic, and Netscape was the clear leader. Because of this, people didn't care that Netscape was horribly broken, and wrote HTML which was broken by design (such as elements without terminating semicolons). Then Netscape would release an updated version which fixed the behaviour, and a lot of the web would just "not work" ..

Enter IE. IE came along as a half-baked licencing of the Spyglass Mosaic source. Think Mosaic v1, but in 1996 when it had to compete against Netscape v2. It didn't get any better until IE v4 in 1998. But IE 4 (and 5, and 5.5) also have gaping holes in their support for common, well known standards.

So what's a web designer to do? Because the two main choices (ignore Opera, 99.99% of people will not use shareware when all other browsers are freeware) are both so poor, the web designer is stuck using the lowest common denominator standards, using horrible kludges to work around the broken feature sets of the browsers used to render their work. Worse, once one of the two browsers gains more than a certain percentage of market share, a lot of web designers will go ahead and write broken HTML using the features of the most common browser out of exasperation (not to mention all the "web programming" programs targetted at absolute newbies, such as Front Page, which produce highly non-portable HTML).

Microsoft (and some other FUDsters that remain) like to talk about Linux and fragmentation of standards in the Unix camp, yet they go ahead and do EXACTLY the same thing in their own little places. The balkanization of the web is well on its way to happening, thanks to the standards-incompliant browsers out there.

You think it's bad having to spend 799$ on MS Word to be able to read the macro viruses that most companies use for documentation systems? Wait until one company (in this case, Microsoft, but Netscape was just as bad when it had its large percentage of market share) has control of web standards. How much will a good browser which supports the latest MS-HTML feature cost in 2003?

Dr. Jakob Nielsen did some research into browser usage patterns that could present a way to avoid the problems of incompatible HTML. It's simple: get a browser with standards support available before Jan. 2001. If you can get it into that window, people will start using your browser.

Mozilla looks like it can make it, if they get some help from people in making sure that they have good standards compliance out of the gate. Right now, Mozilla has some notable problems with CSS 1 (such as conflicts between CSS margining, paragraph indentation, and HTML 4.0 tables) and other parts of its rendering engine interacting badly.

Web designers want to use standards in their daily business. It lets them be free to write sites that work the best possible way. If you give them clients using standards compliance browsers, they will make standards compliant websites.

If the free software programmers help get the gecko engine working properly, and provide a nice wrapper to it (such as the Galeon Gnome wrapper for Gecko), people will switch to it. Provide stability, provide standards compliance, and give it away free. People will download it (especially since gecko+wrapper should be a lot smaller than Mozilla itself, which has so many other things people might not need, like YetAnotherMailClient). The only catch is that you also need to have a Windows version, or you can bank on MS being able to force people into using IE 6.0.

We have a headstart on MS because Gecko is here today with the source open to people who can help fix it and get it out the door. Don't let this opprotunity go to waste. We can beat the marketters at their own game.


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Browsers are just horrible. Why? No one implements the standards properly. And once a company manages to get a lead in their market share, they ignore the fact that their browsers are broken by design, and add features that the marketting department orders.

The Day the Browser Died by Jeffery Zeldman illustrates quite nicely how this happened with Netscape v4, which fails to support CSS very well at all (IIRC, it turns CSS into some sort of Javascript style page stuff).

People have never had much choice when it came to web browsers. In the early days, it was Netscape or Mosaic, and Netscape was the clear leader. Because of this, people didn't care that Netscape was horribly broken, and wrote HTML which was broken by design (such as elements without terminating semicolons). Then Netscape would release an updated version which fixed the behaviour, and a lot of the web would just "not work" ..

Enter IE. IE came along as a half-baked licencing of the Spyglass Mosaic source. Think Mosaic v1, but in 1996 when it had to compete against Netscape v2. It didn't get any better until IE v4 in 1998. But IE 4 (and 5, and 5.5) also have gaping holes in their support for common, well known standards.

So what's a web designer to do? Because the two main choices (ignore Opera, 99.99% of people will not use shareware when all other browsers are freeware) are both so poor, the web designer is stuck using the lowest common denominator standards, using horrible kludges to work around the broken feature sets of the browsers used to render their work. Worse, once one of the two browsers gains more than a certain percentage of market share, a lot of web designers will go ahead and write broken HTML using the features of the most common browser out of exasperation (not to mention all the "web programming" programs targetted at absolute newbies, such as Front Page, which produce highly non-portable HTML).

Microsoft (and some other FUDsters that remain) like to talk about Linux and fragmentation of standards in the Unix camp, yet they go ahead and do EXACTLY the same thing in their own little places. The balkanization of the web is well on its way to happening, thanks to the standards-incompliant browsers out there.

You think it's bad having to spend 799$ on MS Word to be able to read the macro viruses that most companies use for documentation systems? Wait until one company (in this case, Microsoft, but Netscape was just as bad when it had its large percentage of market share) has control of web standards. How much will a good browser which supports the latest MS-HTML feature cost in 2003?

Dr. Jakob Nielsen did some research into browser usage patterns that could present a way to avoid the problems of incompatible HTML. It's simple: get a browser with standards support available before Jan. 2001. If you can get it into that window, people will start using your browser.

Mozilla looks like it can make it, if they get some help from people in making sure that they have good standards compliance out of the gate. Right now, Mozilla has some notable problems with CSS 1 (such as conflicts between CSS margining, paragraph indentation, and HTML 4.0 tables) and other parts of its rendering engine interacting badly.

Web designers want to use standards in their daily business. It lets them be free to write sites that work the best possible way. If you give them clients using standards compliance browsers, they will make standards compliant websites.

If the free software programmers help get the gecko engine working properly, and provide a nice wrapper to it (such as the Galeon Gnome wrapper for Gecko), people will switch to it. Provide stability, provide standards compliance, and give it away free. People will download it (especially since gecko+wrapper should be a lot smaller than Mozilla itself, which has so many other things people might not need, like YetAnotherMailClient). The only catch is that you also need to have a Windows version, or you can bank on MS being able to force people into using IE 6.0.

We have a headstart on MS because Gecko is here today with the source open to people who can help fix it and get it out the door. Don't let this opprotunity go to waste. We can beat the marketters at their own game.


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A reputation manager solves the problem: material can be rated by people after they've downloaded it. The system could track exact duplicates, so the they would inherit (and share) the original's rating - i.e. it would be a distributed rating system, just as the content is distributed. And the rating would be influenced by the repution of the person doing the rating. This catches bogus files, truncated files, mis-named files, low-quality files, etc.

People should be rated as well. People who's material is rated highly would themselves get a high rating, and future material posted by them would have a rating influenced by their poster. Low-rated people would include newcomers, and trouble-makers (intentional or technologically incompetent).

Jacob Nielsen has written about reputation managers. See his article at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990905.html .

However, The site itself has a very cluttered, ad buggered appearance. Perhaps he can find better methods of making revenue. Perhaps he can do what many site designers are doing, and do it as a labour of love (gasp!) without ads. I could care less if I get ad hits on lowmagnet.org because I'm not about to make 1/10th of the money I shelled out to get the site up and running.

For four years, my web site was hosted by the Oregon State University Electrical Engineering Webserver, at this url that was widely linked and in all the search engines' first result page for a number of keywords.

Well, all good things (actually their server was not very reliable) come to an end, and the university was under a big scare, supposedly because of some lawsuit somewhere, regarding old accounts from former students. I got a message that I would need to move my site.

I did indeed move the page, to it's new and permanent location, but even after over a year, the old site still gets lots of hits. Forunately, they have been nice enough to keep my redirector page in place all this time.

At first, I did what seemed like the obvious thing and I set the HTTP-EQUIV meta tag to redirect, in zero seconds. Seemed like a good idea. It was actually like that for months, and I was totally unaware of the problem. I finally got an angry e-mail from someone who was upset that I messed with his back button, but as far as I could tell, nothing on my site would do that. Indeed, nothing on my site was doing anything with the back button.... by that time I hardly gave any though to the old urls anymore, so it didn't even occur to me at the time to try going to the old url and then seeing if the back button still worked. Even if I'd typed the old URL, to experience what an ordinary web surfer got, I would have had to find my url from a link (not hard, since the search engines don't update well anymore, even if you fill out their forms to rescan your url).

Well, several weeks later, I learned what had happened while reading Jokob Nielsen's Alertbox Column, Top Ten New Mistakes of Web Design. Breaking the back button was his number 1 offense, and I was guilty... and until that moment I didn't even know it.

My point in all this, dear reader (and you're still reading after all this rambling), is that it's easy to need to redirect users, because old URLs don't stop getting hits, even after a year.

Some people have said that the web design should use a location redirect in the HTTP header. I tried this, but the browsers generally don't honor that from within the HTTP-EQUIV meta tag (even though they should), and I have no control over the configuration of the server itself, only the html content.

It's easy to say the commercial companies are different, since their web servers are for their corporate missing (whatever that is), but I can easily see how the "web designer" only has control over the content within the html file itself, and not the web server config... often times controlled by an admin who isn't helpful, or a third party hosting company.

He'll tell you that this is the #1 mistake in the top-ten list of mistakes done by webpages. And I agree. Linking to the outside world, and letting other people back out of your site shouldn't affect it. How else could Yahoo!(tm)(r)(c) become so popular, eh? They certainly don't have a lack of people browsing their site.

The back button is the most often used widget in the browser. If a user hits a site they don't want to see, or make a mistake -- boom, off they go. Locking them in to a site once they get in agrivates them (it sure pisses me off).

My suggestion: turn off Javascript in any browser which allows you to (except Netscape, because that kills CSS [why?]).

So what happens to sites which still do disable the back button, or otherwise lock you in? Well, I tend to just kill my browser process. It's simply easier than dealing with BS websites. Plus, I know to never go to that site again (it'd be nice if Mozilla had a dynamic blocklist which would mark down sites which do this, and block them).
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