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Unless the content can be enlarged to tv-size (and there are very large televisions out there ;) But let's say your average sized one) with no degredation (well, no quality-loss that a human can perceive anyway), I can't see the Itunes Video Store taking off.

At some point, the content will be TV-sized with no loss of quality. Bandwidth and storage sizes are increasing at an exponential rate (see this and this). In five or ten years, I'd be surprised if cheap, extremely high-resolution TV shows and movies weren't avaliable for download, possibly even through the TV itself. Apple iTV, coming soon to a shop near you!

That is an interesting take.

It sounds like you are saying "Microsoft is willing to try something completely new (innovate?)", while "Apple only takes existing stuff that you know and polishes it up a bit".

Go read Jakob Nielson's take on the new Office: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/wysiwyg.html

Check out Jakob Nielsen's research on this (here's a quickly found page on Google http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html). Anything more then 11 testers would have been completely pointless and a waste of time.

You are right in that 11 users is not going to give you statistically sound results about how usable a system is, or how it compares to other systems.

However, research in the discount usability / guerrilla HCI area has shown that you do not need many user observations to find the majority of serious usability issues - which is the name of the game here.

After five or so users you tend to see the same usability issues cropping up again and again. From a pragmatic point of view, usability professionals are trying to find the most usability problems at a cost effective price.

Claiming that the results are not meaningful and "mostly useless" really is missing the point.

For more info check out this link or Nielsen's analysis (1 and 2) for more info.

You are right in that 11 users is not going to give you statistically sound results about how usable a system is, or how it compares to other systems.

However, research in the discount usability / guerrilla HCI area has shown that you do not need many user observations to find the majority of serious usability issues - which is the name of the game here.

After five or so users you tend to see the same usability issues cropping up again and again. From a pragmatic point of view, usability professionals are trying to find the most usability problems at a cost effective price.

Claiming that the results are not meaningful and "mostly useless" really is missing the point.

For more info check out this link or Nielsen's analysis (1 and 2) for more info.

89% sounds like a very good success ratio for the date and time test. However, RTFA and you'll see that only eleven people participated, most of them female.

So only one of them had problems? Sounds good.

If you don't have a diverse testing population, you aren't going to produce meaningful results. The idea is fine and all, but the results are mostly useless.

You shouldn't let the small numbers put you off. Respected usability professionals say you only need five people for meaningful results.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html

I've long advised clients, friends, family members, and anyone I can meet to never ever ever use Flash on their site UNLESS you need it for some very specific use (interactive game, media player) and then it should still be an option.

Recently I did some research and I found that about 20-30% of people don't have Flash installed. Further, as you've pointed out, over 50% of people cannot use Flash correctly to navigate a page. This means if you're a company, roughly two-thirds of your audience are not seeing your content. That makes no business sense whatsoever.

If Flash sites weren't (usually) garishly designed, searchable, easy to print, and had text that you could select and copy, then maybe I wouldn't be so against it.

Informed rumour in the UK scene / community has it that the "unauthorised access" of which he was accused consisted of adding " ../ " to the end of an URL.

Which, according to usability enigneering expert Jakob Nielsen, constitutes interaction with a user interface of the Web site. Nielsen recommends site owners to support URL "hacking" for the sake of usability.

Informed rumour in the UK scene / community has it that the "unauthorised access" of which he was accused consisted of adding " ../ " to the end of an URL.

Which, according to usability enigneering expert Jakob Nielsen, constitutes interaction with a user interface of the Web site. Nielsen recommends site owners to support URL "hacking" for the sake of usability.

"Towards that end, we look at how often certain pages get hit (such as help pages, search pages, site maps, the back button, hierarchial links etc) as well as surveys." (My emphasis)

Two important points here - firstly, it's well-known that a large proportion of users are search-dominant, or at least use a mixture of searching and links[1].

Although the numbers differ (eg, between the two articles), both agree that up to 80% of users use either search primarily or search and navigation links when navigating a web site.

Either way, hits on search pages don't offer a reliable indication of a problem with navigation.

Secondly, user-surveys are actually one of the worst ways to gather information about the site. It's well known in HCI circles that you simply can't trust user-surveys - users are very good at telling you what they think they did (or would do), but extremely poor at reporting what they actually did.

I think this is often because the overwhelming majority of navigation decisions users take are completely subconscious - they themselves aren't aware of why certain links look good, or why they ignore certain sections of the page (eg, because they subconsciously identify them as looking like adverts).

[1] Although hthis second article attempts to verify Jakob Nielson's figures, it appears to have its own problems - namely, confusing "search-dominant users" (who quickly default to searching) with "users who only ever use search functionality". Clearly users will have to click on a few links, merely to get onto and off of the search page(s).

Despite this, all figures I've seen (as well as my own reasearch) indicates that a mixed-search-and-navigation-links strategy is used by around 80% of users.

"Towards that end, we look at how often certain pages get hit (such as help pages, search pages, site maps, the back button, hierarchial links etc) as well as surveys." (My emphasis)

Two important points here - firstly, it's well-known that a large proportion of users are search-dominant, or at least use a mixture of searching and links[1].

Although the numbers differ (eg, between the two articles), both agree that up to 80% of users use either search primarily or search and navigation links when navigating a web site.

Either way, hits on search pages don't offer a reliable indication of a problem with navigation.

Secondly, user-surveys are actually one of the worst ways to gather information about the site. It's well known in HCI circles that you simply can't trust user-surveys - users are very good at telling you what they think they did (or would do), but extremely poor at reporting what they actually did.

I think this is often because the overwhelming majority of navigation decisions users take are completely subconscious - they themselves aren't aware of why certain links look good, or why they ignore certain sections of the page (eg, because they subconsciously identify them as looking like adverts).

[1] Although hthis second article attempts to verify Jakob Nielson's figures, it appears to have its own problems - namely, confusing "search-dominant users" (who quickly default to searching) with "users who only ever use search functionality". Clearly users will have to click on a few links, merely to get onto and off of the search page(s).

Despite this, all figures I've seen (as well as my own reasearch) indicates that a mixed-search-and-navigation-links strategy is used by around 80% of users.

All these posts about HCI and not a single one of them links to Jacob Nielson?

WTF???

Oh, you mean the man who is too arrogant to use mailto: links because he only wants mail from the people who go through the extra effort of manually entering his email address?

Usability, right.

This is a good study of how hard it is to design secure systems. It's just like a non-cryptographer trying to create their own cipher, only in the visual processing world. Sadly, the article does not touch on non-visual captchas, which are alternatives for the blind. It would also be interesting to see what Jakob Nielsen might have to say on this technology from a usability perspective.

Of course, one of the primary bad things is that the concept of a captcha is patented, and the patent language is very broad. US Patent# 6,195,698

Also see the Wikipedia article for more information.

That particular site was written about ad nauseam, but lack of support for Mac wasn't it's major problem. The site was simply a pain to use, as has been noted in written form at least once.

Wow... just... wow.

I'm sorry about this, and I don't mean to be an arse, but you can argue hypertext theory and philosophy all day. The fact remains that this is neither insightful, interesting, new nor well-executed.

As you indicate in your post, fat (or multi-) linking is not a new idea.

"This is not about being compatible with a popular browser"

Hate to break it to you bud, but in web design, on the web, it is.

If you were doing something really revolutionary here the shoddy implementation would be cut some slack for the conceptual innovation, but what you've produced is fundamentally a drop-down menu.

These have been around as long as layers/divs and javascript - probably pushing ten years now. We've got them in javascript, cross-browser and even CSS-only incarnations.

In addition, you haven't even implemented fat links properly - true fat links should open all the pages they link to from a single click - this is the only thing that separates "multi-links" from "drop-down menus", and your version doesn't do it.

Now, it might be hard to write a plugin for PmWiki, but that's the only bit of (even potential) innovation here, and it's ridiculously self-aggrandising to submit it to Slashdot as any kind of news item.

You might well be owed some small amount of kudos for extending PmWiki's functionality, but your "solution" is so terribly executed (FFS, cross-browser menus aren't hard) and unprofessionally produced ("SWITCH TO Firefox NOW") that any tiny helpful advance is quite lost in the roaring mediocrity of the "feature".

In fact, I know of several rather more militant webmasters who'd probably rather string you up (for encouraging the use and dissemination of such terrible broken code) than pat you on the back for writing this Wiki plugin.

Basically, possibly apart from the Wiki back-end (which might well be hard, but which nobody's interested in), it's not innovative, interesting or elegant. Submitting such a non-event to a widely-read and volatile environment like Slashdot is just asking for people to beat on you for your presumption, especially when you present it like it's the Philosophers' Stone or something.

I'm assuming from your code that you're a beginner web-developer - if so I humbly apologise for the kicking you're getting, and suggest you gain a bit more experience before hyping your next hack. Hackers (and the Slashdot crowd) are generally very sensitive to over-hyping and BS - make sure it's at least interesting before you start telling people it's revolutionary.

HTH

If not, you should seriously consider reading up - may I suggest A List Apart, CSS Edge and Jakob Nielson's Alertbox. They'll save you a lot of embarrassment before going quite so public next time...

It is so sad to see this kind of diffusion of UI styles that this, and every program like Winamp etc. offers with new "skins". I want to just use my computer, not hunt for the UI elements. "Oh, the clown's nose is a checkbox, and his shoes are radio buttons! AWESOME USER INTERFACE DESIGN MAN! THIS IS SO INTUITIVE! I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE NEW GARDEN GNOME INTERFACE!"

Doesn't anyone remember back when the Mac and Windows came out, how it was fantastic that we had a CONSISTENT user interface? How we didn't need to learn yet another persons crazy GUI scheme? How developers didn't need to hack up custom UI designs using graphics primitives but instead could call simple SDK calls?

And think of HTML. Why in the WORLD would I want to install all that "stuff" when I can just say...

<input type=checkbox name=foo value=bar>CHECK ME

This is a joke, right? +1, Funny for sure, but which crackheads are modding this Informative?

Hint A for the clueless: boo.com had atrocious usability, not least in part due to stupid tricks like this.

Hint B for the clueless: the suggested code is popular amongst clueless design-types, and destroys the ability to navigate with the keyboard.

Jacob Nielson's cartoon says this best.

basically helpful tooltips should appear as you are typing, warning you if your input doesn't makes sense or is out of bounds or whatever

Good usability tries to take this further. When designing, one anticipates errors the users might make, and removes the possibility for them happening at all (see Jakob's fifth heuristic). Simple example: instead of using a simple text box for date entry in the format dd/mm/yyyy and hoping the user reads the explanatory note next to the field, one might use three dropdowns.

Careful design helps, but for complex systems not even a guru can predictively design the perfect interface. That's where usability testing makes such a difference. That involves getting real people to use successive iterations of a design until it's really great.

Facilitating and interpreting this testing is a different skill to designing in the first place. Involving test users outside the development team is something that takes preparation, and often money. Is it any wonder that interface design is the weakest link in FOSS?

"Frames suck, and you deserve to cause problems if you use them."

Ok, here are some answers:

Question 1) Because it's annoying
Question 2) No
Question 3) Yes, but only for conversations in which only one side is heard

As for *why* public cell use is annoying, it doesn't matter what the medium is, if we can only hear one side of the conversation, it interrupts and puts more demands on our attention (ever been annoyed by the guy in the next cubicle talking loudly on the phone? - I say loudly in this context becdause cubes are built to muffle noise so you won't generally hear normal conversation).

Our brains are trained to know what a turn-taking conversation is and so can tune it out. However, if you can only hear one side of a conversation, it's like constantly telling your brain to start paying attention because there's a new conversation starting up!

Check out this link for relevant research:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040412.html/

So, in conclusion, talking on a cell in public is just plain rude. Unless you deliberately want to be a jackass, go somewhere private to have your conversation, don't disturb everyone else.

Actually, it's not clear that people DO talk louder. There's just something annoying about cell phone converstations:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040412.html

(Why Mobile Phones are Annoying)

Tabs integrate well with 'net browsing. PDF documents don't.

Showing PDF files embedded in a browser window is a pain mainly because of its lack of consistency with the rest of the browser commands. Showing the PDF in its own, dedicated application is usually a better solution.

Since usability guru Jakob Nielson wrote Flash: 99% Bad in 2000, a lot has changed about Flash. He worked with Macromedia to improve Flash's usability, and he sells a report with 117 design guidelines for Flash usability. So yes, it is possible to develop usable applications in Flash.

OpenLaszlo is an open source language and set of tools for developing full fledged rich web applications, which are compiled into SWF files that run on the Flash player. Laszlo/Flash is presently much more capable of implementing high quality cross platform user interfaces than dynamic AJAX/HTML/SVG currently is.

Laszlo is a high level XML and JavaScript based programming language. It's independent of Flash in the same way that GCC is independent of the Intel instruction set and Windows runtime, because they both compile a higher level language, and can target other runtimes and instruction sets.

Currently Flash is the most practical, so that's what Laszlo supports initially, but it can be retargeted to other runtimes like SVG, XUL, Java or Avalon, once they grow up and mature. But right now Flash is the best way to go, because of its overwhelming installed base and consistency across multiple platforms.

The problem with SVG is that it's extremely spotty and inconsistent across the different browsers and plug-ins and cell phones that implement it. So the lowest common denominator is very very low indeed. Dynamic HTML has the same inconsistency problems but with much worse graphics, and it's that horrible inconsistency that forces cross-browser web applications to be so clumsy and hard to use -- because they must restrict themselves to the lowest common denominator. But Flash is consistent across all platforms, and it has high quality graphics.

I've written complex, rich interactive web based applications in both SVG and Laszlo, and I like them both. I've also used Microsoft's VML, which enabled animated vector graphics inline with html many years ago, and Dynamic HTML Behavior Controls, which work pretty well, but only in Explorer, so they're a dead end.

SVG is wonderful, but it's lost its steam: too little, too late. Adobe, once its main proponent, has totally forgotten about it, and they're quite unlikely to put any more effort into it, now that they've bought Macromedia. Batik development has been stalled, and it's slow because it's "100% Pure Java". SVG has some nice advantages over Flash, but it will never beat Flash's 98% penetration.

I'd love to see SVG get its shit together, but it's going to be a long time the way the companies that were once sponsoring it like Adobe, Canon and Kodak, have appearently given up and gone on to other things. I'd love for somebody to prove that I'm wrong, but Flash has kicked SVG's ass in the market.

Once there's a fast, stable, full featured, ubiquitious SVG renderer (like Firefox may someday support), it will make a lot of sense to target it with the Laszlo compiler. But SVG is a huge complex standard, and it will take a lot of work to completely implement it in Firefox.

But there's a much more interesting and efficient route than building everything including SVG and the kitchen sink into a web browser, and that's to factor out and develop a reusable open source Flash-compatible SWF player,

What is this obsession you have with "everybody"? First you state that "everybody" uses PDFs - wrong. Then you keep implying that since "everybody" does it, it absolutely must be the best solution.

PDF sucks for reading stuff off the screen, and I'm not going to print out 700 pages.

I'm not talking about PDF files. I'm talking about Acrobat's WEB plugin. You know, for all those braindead web designers who think it's OK to put web content in the form of PDF or Flash.

Look here.

of what NOT to do.

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, July 14, 2003:
PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption

In this case, the article IS a big, linear text blob.

Pdfs are Unfit for human consumptionhttp://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030714. html

I went to the website you suggested, and I'd like my eyesight back now. If that was fit for human consumption... ouch.

For those that can't be bothered to read it, in short, PDF's are designed for printing documents whilst preserving the original formatting as the author intended. Jacob therefore asserts that they're "unfit for human consumption" if you try and use them for something different to their intended purpose, in this case, online reading.

Next week Jacob will be telling us how washing machines are great for keeping your clothes clean but not very good for making cups of tea.

Pdfs are Unfit for human consumption

You bring up valid points, and I will certainly agree that Flash has some serious usability issues that make Jakob Nielsen scream. However, most of these points aren't easily addressable by the designers, as they are inherent problems with Flash itself. Until Macromedia actively addresses these problems instead of playing with ridiculous stuff like webcams and flying text, yes, Flash sites will be inherently less accessible. That's not to say that it's not useful, though.

Try thinking of designing a Flash-based site in the same light as designing a pure XML site. With XML the problem is browser support; with Flash it is usability. Either way, the ultimate question to ask is whether or not the added features and benefits are enough to outweigh the current problems -- will the target audience be adversely affected? Until MSIE (correctly) supports XML, the likelihood that it will catch on as a preferred content type is fairly weak despite the obvious advantages of fully semantic markup. Likewise, until Macromedia fully addresses Flash's usability concerns, its chances of widespread success as a web design format are equally weak.

That's because Adobe is trying to make PDF the be-all-and-end-all of document formats -- when it's only useful as a common format for printing.

Do we really need a PDF document to display flash, sound, full motion video, and act like a webpage?

Every web user knows, along with Jakob Nielsen, that clean and simple web page design is best. However, every corporate web page designer knows that flashy and graphics-laden is the only way to go. Ever since the <img> tag was invented, these two worldviews have been for all intents and purposes irreconciliable. It'd be truly lovely if something could persuade the corporate designers of the www to KIS,S, but I'm not holding my breath...

Funny you should ask. From Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox posted today:

Finally, search creates problems for lower-literacy users...[T]hey have difficulty processing search results...As a result, [they] often simply pick the first hit on the list, even if it's not the most appropriate for their needs.

Funny you should ask. From Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox posted today:

Finally, search creates problems for lower-literacy users...[T]hey have difficulty processing search results...As a result, [they] often simply pick the first hit on the list, even if it's not the most appropriate for their needs.

Funny you should ask. From Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox posted today:

Finally, search creates problems for lower-literacy users...[T]hey have difficulty processing search results...As a result, [they] often simply pick the first hit on the list, even if it's not the most appropriate for their needs.

I manually edited the URL to read item6.html and voila' I got the page. Is that hacking? I think not.

It isn't. The URL is part of the Web user interface.

What is your take on people that use the html generation tools (such as Netscape Composer)?

WYSIWYG is a myth on the web. Or rather, what you see is pretty unimportant. Rendering can, will and should differ depending upon the individual circumstances of the person visiting a website.

When you pay somebody to develop a website, you aren't paying them to draw you a picture that happens to have text in. The web is not like print media, it's fluid. What you are paying them for is a set of pages that adapt to the circumstances under which they are viewed.

WYSIWYG tools such as Netscape Composer are not very good for this purpose. They give a decent impression when all you do is type out a few pages and look at them on your computer, but to get results that are suitable for professional use, there really isn't any substitute for coding by hand.

Of course, many professionals code the front-end by hand, and use a CMS with a nice GUI on the back-end to make things simple for their clients. This is a good thing; hand-coded websites aren't better because they are harder to create, they are better because the HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc has been crafted to work appropriately - something an automated tool simply cannot do. Pouring content - that may have been entered by a nice GUI interface - into a hand-written "mould" like this is good practice.

So GUI tools aren't intrinsically bad, so long as they are simply the means by which you enter content into a high-quality front-end. The trouble is, many tools, including Netscape Composer, don't distinguish between the two tasks and also create the front-end for you - something they are unable to do effectively.

In terms of how much credence I'd give, it's roughly this order (best first):

1. Developers that have developed their own CMS specifically for the task at hand.
2. Developers that use an off-the-shelf CMS with templates they hand-coded.
3. Developers that hand-code.
4. Developers that use an off-the-shelf CMS.
5. Developers who use "WYSIWYG" tools to manipulate pages using templates that they hand-coded.
6. Developers whose websites are generated through "WYSIWYG" tools.

Most organisations will get the best quality:price ratio by hiring people somewhere in the middle - anything more is often overkill.

Also, what about companies that end up supporting a site that was written partially/entirely with what I would call sub-standard tools? It is almost never in the budget to re-write an entire site.

This is quite common, yes. One situation that is sadly very frequent is when a professional firm takes over something the manager's nephew did, or something that is otherwise awful but that they spent a lot of money on.

I know I've been trapped in the situation of maintaining hideous messes until the client can afford a redesign, when the only reason they can't afford a redesign is because they got ripped off by somebody who didn't know what they were doing.

Depending on the size of the website in question, it's sometimes quicker to simply start over from scratch. If the people who originally developed the site didn't know what they were doing, chances are, reorganising all the information is badly needed anyway.

I would guess a common response to a request to rewrite would be 'It works, doesn't it?'

It's an oversimplification, but a hard one to shake. Jakob Nielsen argues that a poor-quality website is harmful in the long run.

In some cases a poor website can directly lead to business risk. For instance, a website that doesn't follow the W3C specifications is more likely to break when a new version of a browser is released. This is a historic trend with concrete examples that goes back to

Nielsen has published ten high-level heuristics for making a good interface. You can use it as a checklist.

Also try usability guru Jakob Nielsen's site Useit. Although mostly focused on web design it s a good read for anyone designing interfaces.

I would answer no.
It won't be ready for consumers until Joe Enduser, who doesn't want to learn how to program, or compile, or write drivers, who just wants to play games and go on the Internet and write letters, can go to Best Buy, buy a computer with Linux preinstalled, buy a printer at Best Buy, have that Just Work (as in it comes with a Linux driver; he doesn't have to write it himself or hunt one down in a forum where he will be derided for being a "st00pid n00b lol"), and buy Half Life 2 for Linux at Best Buy and have that Just Work-just install the game, no need to compile a binary for it or learn how to use wine.
And don't say "Oh, he can research that (where "that" is what hardware works with Linux, how to run wine, etc)!" This is not somebody like us who is interested in computers. This is somebody who just wants to get his work done, buy some stuff off Amazon, and play some games. He has enough on his plate without having to learn a lot about computers. (For an excellent rebuttal to the "stupid user/luser" sterotype by Jakob Nielsen, click here)

The old ideas of crumb trails (navigation paths on top of pages) are coming back, not because users need them but because Google needs them to crawl your site well.

No actually. Breadcrumb navigation is good for usability. Read about them from Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru himself, here and here. Breadcrumb navigation helps users get a mental picture of a website and where they are within it. It is particularly useful to users who come to a deep page from a search engine (be it MSN or Google) and need to orient themselves.

The old ideas of crumb trails (navigation paths on top of pages) are coming back, not because users need them but because Google needs them to crawl your site well.

No actually. Breadcrumb navigation is good for usability. Read about them from Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru himself, here and here. Breadcrumb navigation helps users get a mental picture of a website and where they are within it. It is particularly useful to users who come to a deep page from a search engine (be it MSN or Google) and need to orient themselves.

"If Jakob Nielson's useit.com is ever linked to again on Slashdot, I will add "127.0.0.1 slashdot.org" to /etc/hosts"

3 lines below, AC cuts off the very branch he sits on:

"The UseIt article is 6 years old. The advances in 3D desktops, screen resolutions and HCI devices have improved since then. Link value = 0 --Blade-Melbourne"

Good riddance ;)

Nielson is not the voice of usability. Most of his ideas are outdated and severely limit the possibilities that advances in technology have made possible. I would like all people with any interest in HCI or usability to question every one of the highly subjective (and questionable) "facts" that Nielson promotes.

The UseIt article is 6 years old. The advances in 3D desktops, screen resolutions and HCI devices have improved since then. Link value = 0 --Blade-Melbourne

Nielson is not the voice of usability. Most of his ideas are outdated and severely limit the possibilities that advances in technology have made possible. I would like all people with any interest in HCI or usability to question every one of the highly subjective (and questionable) "facts" that Nielson promotes.

The UseIt article is 6 years old. The advances in 3D desktops, screen resolutions and HCI devices have improved since then. Link value = 0 --Blade-Melbourne

I'm finding myself slightly stupified at the prospect that the only think keeping this vision from coming true is that we needed to take away the ability for users to make their own site, and then make the whole thing a little easier to update. We still have things like blogs about cats, so I'm not sure the content has become any better, but was this really all the user really needed? It boggles the mind.

Interestingly enough, it is this characteristic that Jakob Nielsen has been harping on about for years:

Jakob's Law of the Internet User Experience : users spend most of their time on other websites.

Web design and this notion of looking different to every other site is overrated. It is going against what people find usable. There are a lot of well structured blog sites out there - I hesitate to use the word design, since blogs really goes right down to the information architecture layer and get it right from there.

By giving up the "need" to design sites and by going for a templated approach, that gives web site owners, who now become bloggers, more time to focus on content.

Thankfully the days of great looking but content-less sites are fading fast. Content is still king.

It is a pity its with blog software (and tools like wiki) that Tim Berners Lee's original conception of the web of being an updatable resource is starting to come together. Blogs and wikis are making up for the deficiencies of browsers and web servers.

There is one major problem with Google's client-side javascript magic: It breaks the back button.

This breaks the second most used user interface feature on the internet. Quote from the link: The Back button is the lifeline of the Web user and the second-most used navigation feature (after following hypertext links). Users happily know that they can try anything on the Web and always be saved by a click or two on Back to return them to familiar territory.

The auto-complete isn't really affected by this, but try it in your Gmail account. I hope they will figure out a way to fix it.