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I really wish someone would give these guys a pile of cash to redesign computer GUIs. I can't be the only one that is sick of the slow pace of development of computer interfaces. We really haven't progressed much since the work of Xerox Park.

What you will get is a computer with a color screen and a pointer device, windows, icons, and menus. What we know as computers today is a result of years of evolution. There is not much potential for radical change unless there is a radical change in the way computers work and interface with the real world. What is more likely to happen is more specialization of devices. Cellphones, digital cameras, etc. are besically computers but easier to use because the particular device is designed for some particular pupose(s). Universal computers supporting word processing as well as online brokerage, Java programming as well as image processing, and gaming as well as spamming, are different from that. They do, of course, not fit any particular purpose outstandingly well but that's a feature and not a design bug.

Also, the WIMP approach represents a canonical solution to the lower levels of interaction. Mice and windows help you to express what you want to do as soon as you what you have to do in order to achieve your goal at hand. They do help you to format text in a word processor but they don't tell you how typesetting works and how to produce a nice looking and readable document. Teaching higher level concepts through user interfaces indeed is a problem largely unsolved, but replacing mice and windows with radically different won't solve it either, at least not for general purpose devices.

If you've ever sat down with someone who hasn't used a computer much and watch them struggle to do the simplest things, you'll understand how bad current GUIs are.

Es dauert Jahre, eine Fremdsprache oder eine andere nichttriviale FÃhigkeit halbwegs zu lernen. Warum sollten Computer ohne jeden Lernaufwand zu benutzen sein? (It takes several years to learn to some extent a foreign language or any other non-trivial skill. Why do you think computers could be usable without any effort learning them?) Sure, it would be nice if they were but don't you expect too much here? Is your assessment of the current situation even correct? As a matter of fact, a lot of people is able to use current computers. It takes them time learning what they can do with their machines and how to do it but they do send and receive e-mail, surf the Web, and make friends online. And they achieve much more than just watching kind of interactive TV this way.

Get real, the revolution you are asking for will have to wait until the Holodeck(TM) has been invented, or Direct Brain Access(R).

A site on growing blueberries can be a must-read service for people who farm them, and thus of immense value as a place to promote blueberry-farming equipment.

Diversity is power on the Web. Big sites may be bigger, but smaller sites will keep scoring higher for specialized topics, both in terms of their connections with users and in terms of each visit's commercial value.

A site on growing blueberries can be a must-read service for people who farm them, and thus of immense value as a place to promote blueberry-farming equipment.

Diversity is power on the Web. Big sites may be bigger, but smaller sites will keep scoring higher for specialized topics, both in terms of their connections with users and in terms of each visit's commercial value.

...and make no money. As usual, Jakob Nielsen slants the data in a way that seems so very important. But, almost no small sites make any money. Why isn't that the real story? Bah!!

As usual, Jakob throws shit against the wall. A little sticks, but a lot of it does not stick. Why do people ignore this? For example, he predicted micropayments, which would be great for small web sites. Are micropayments viable now? No! They sucked in 2000 and they suck now. (Good idea, but, micropayments suck!)

Last year I wrote Spanking Jakob Nielsen. I'm just so tired of how he throws around ideas and "important" data and people got nuts. Have you ever noticed that he rarely points to sites outside of useit.com and he often is selling his usability reports? Drives me insane...

Reduce your browser window size, or change your font size. You have full control of those (as per proper usability guidelines).

I hereby decree that all doorknobs must be 12 feet from the floor. Bending over is hard for tall people so making the handle very high is most convenient since you have full control over wearing platform shoes (as per proper usability guidelines).

I am pretty, Oh so pretty...

I find Jakob Nielsen to be an excellent source for scientifically valid usability information. In other words, his advice is based on actual research, not just whatever his cat Mittens told him (anyone know this reference?)

http://www.cs.vt.edu/~rosson/papers/paradox.pdf

SBC Communication's claim of ownership for a common Web site formatting tool is based on a pair of patents, U.S. Patent No. 5,933,841, having a grant date of August 1999, and U.S. Patent No. 6,442,574, which issued three years later in 2002. Both patents cover a "structured document browser" having an invention date at least as early as May 1996, which is the filing date for both the original application that matured into the '841 patent and the continuation application that resulted in the '574 patent. The claimed browser includes a constant user interface for displaying and viewing sections of a document that is organized with embedded codes specifying the structure of the document. The tags are mapped to a set of icons which, when selected, will result in the browser displaying a section of the document structure corresponding to the selected icon, while preserving the user interface.

Didn't just about every Windows 3.x and Macintosh OS 6.x application with a settings/preferences/options window do just this? In, say, 1989?

Maybe someone, somewhere remembers Hypercard? This guy does.

Didn't ProComm Plus for Windows 3.1 have a BBS list with the features described above?

You could do the same thing in NextStep, especially in their network browser. See Dummies guide to NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP or NeXTstation - Timeline & Specifications.

Someone at MuseumTour.com should jump on the prior-art side of this argument...

-Don

I've noticed even more invasive ads, more so than pop-unders or pop-ups (see this google article for their take on it). Coming to the mainstream it seems that flash ads that popup over the page itself and make some noise are becoming quite popular, and I've decided to completely stop visiting these sites, weather.com being one of them. (I think they're running an ad right now where a rhino busts through your page...wahoo.) Thankfully, the National Weather Service is ad-free! These ads are not only annoying, but make it difficult to close and take too much time when all you want is real content.

This article on Low-End Media for User Empowerment explains why simple adverstising works, and why complex doesn't.

Because...

Summary: Fancy media on websites typically fails user testing. Simple text and clear photos not only communicate better with users, they also enhance users' feeling of control and thus support the Web's mission as an instant gratification environment.

Why Complex Media Gets into Sites

Design agencies sometimes recommend more elaborate solutions than the client really needs in order to increase their billing.

Website managers never watch people using their websites, so they make decisions without first-hand understanding of usability. Because advanced solutions seem better intuitively, those managers are easy prey for promoters of complexity.

Source: Low-End Media for User Empowerment, Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, April 21, 2003

I would reference Home Page Usability in which rule #94 is to have an alternate home page for times of emergency. The New York Times had a successful deployment of such a page on 9/11, and seems to be meeting demand now. I wonder how many others agencies have emergency web pages set up that can better meet demand.

why are people so opposed to Flash on the net?

Put simply, it's because Flash makes Web sites harder to use. For most sites, it's superfluous, over-complicated and annoying. Furthermore, because Flash breaks a lot of Web conventions (Back, font sizes, accessibility), it's unintuitive.

While I still agree that advertising is the worst thing about Flash - just ahead of the Macromedia site so longer working in Opera - I generally hate sites that use Flash at all, because things just take so much longer. Of course, there are a few shining examples.

why are people so opposed to Flash on the net?

By and large people aren't opposed to Flash all the time, but they are opposed to bad uses of Flash. Take the Opencroquet site: they use Flash for a trivial navigation menu. The menu could have easily been implemented with Javascript rollovers, or ever pure CSS. Both would have been faster to load and more friendly to a variety of web clients (including cell phones, text only browsers, and web browsers for the blind (both for braille displays and spoken))

Too many sites are using Flash because they're under the mistaken assumption that having their menu bar shimmer and flicker will improve their site. These people are obsessing about superficial detail and ignoring real content. If I visit your auto-dealership to consider a car purchase anything that slows down my experience is a problem. There is no need for the menus to dance, just show me the damn cars! In general, adding Flash causes a usability decrease. (The linked article is a bit old, but still valid.)

Now, there is a place for Flash. But too many clueless superficial web designers are actually detracting from the value of their web site by needlessly involving Flash.

...don't forget to visit CarHenge in Allaince. Not exactly on I-80, but it's awfully cool anyway. Here's a link: /htmlCarHenge

If you see everything on your screen that's not part of a document as clutter, then tabs add (marginally) to clutter.

But using tabs takes the list of active web documents out of the Taskbar/Dock/etc., where other documents and programs are listed. So your interface becomes easier to understand at a glance and less cluttered.

I don't buy into the assumption that you MUST browse the web with the biggest percentage of your screen possible devoted to rendering HTML (although you are in good company, as even Jakob Nielsen has complained about this recently - "it's amazing how much space is spent on browser chrome, scrollbars, and other system overhead"). Tabs, history panes, toolbars and the like, take up a relatively small amount of the screen but offer serious improvements in navigation. At today's typical screen resolutions, few sites look better if they're filling the whole screen.

In cases where it is important to see only the document, browsers should allow one-button "full screen" modes. Opera and Phoenix do this, for example.

It's a little dated, but it still applies.
Are Users Stupid?

Check out this page for prior use -

Okay, my turn to post a ridiculously long message.

Turns out, the article last week I was referring to was about Micropayments. However, if you follow a couple of links from there, you will eventually reach an interesting article on the failure of web advertising. The article caught my eye because I really believe that micropayments are the way to go.

I don't actually mind the friend/foe system, although I don't use it. At least in that case the user is consciously deciding who he likes and dislikes. What I find dangerous is the new "friend of a friend" and "foe of a friend" system, which will tend to create cliques of like-minded thinkers who have blocked out any dissenting opinions. I do always read /. logged in, but when I set up this new account, I decided to give anonymous cowards a +1 bonus. I've actually been very impressed with the results; for some reason, anonymous posters tend to post more intelligently than your average score 1 poster (and most of the crap gets modded down to -1 anyway). BTW, speaking of moderation, I have noticed that marking a post "(OT)" is *more* likely, not less likely to get you moderated as offtopic.

As I'm sure you've noticed, I'm a puzzle geek. I look at every fact as a statistic and every situation as a game. Of course, this drives my non-geek friends crazy when they try and hold a normal conversation. But it has always surprised me that most /. readers are not more savvy about statistics and probability analysis. In particular, you see a lot of qualitative arguments where quantitative evidence is called for. One rule of quantitative analysis is that anecdotal evidence doesn't prove anything. We could spend all day arguing about whether or not Ars Technica (for example) is successful, but it's still only one company. Yes, there will inevitably be a few success stories, but it seems clear that the overall market is shrinking.

BTW, if you go to the Ars Technica website, you can see that they are not profitable and they don't aspire to be. "The cold, hard truth: Ars is not a profitable enterprise. That's OK, because we never set out to be." In the geek world, making a profit is not really a noble goal. But consider this: every unprofitable website out there is leeching ad revenue that could be going to a profitable site. The altruistic side of the web will tend to stall the economy.

TV subsided on ad revenue for many years, but only for the lack of anything better. It seems there is only enough ad revenue out there to support 3 networks.When cable came along, the profitability of network TV was slowly eroded. Of course, now there are too many cable channels. Every time the cable company adds a new channel, your rates will inevitably go up, even if you don't subscribe to the new station. More channels means more people need to get paid, which means more revenue per consumer (also, cheaper, poor quality programming). A lot of people didn't see that coming. Also, think about PBS. Public Broadcasting barely scrapes by, thanks to government subsidies and individual donations. Can you imagine if there were multiple PBS stations per town? No way would they all survive. Donations to PBS are charity and most people will only give a very small portion of their income to charity.

I brought up Red Hat because they are widely regarded on /. as being a financial success, even though when you look at their balance sheet, you realize that they aren't. So while you may say that "we" have learned a few things in the last 4 years, judging only from the /. readership, I would say that "we" have merely been jumping from one bandwagon to another. The one common thread among /. business cases is that they all involve giving away your biggest asset for free (or at least very cheaply). Now while it may be possible in a few cases to make money by doing this, the *amount* of money to be made will be drastically decreased. And thus we are drawn back to the quantitative analysis issue.

We see this all the time with CDs. How many times have you heard a /. reader say something like: "CDs are so overpriced. That's why I pirate them. $20 for a CD is ridiculous compared to $10 for a DVD, which at least has bonus tracks; with CDs, all you get is the music. If only CDs cost $3, then I would buy them. Think of the money to be made!!! But no, the labels have to be greedy and screw the musicians." This little gem of an argument has many, many flaws, but note in particular the phony math. The deliberately distorted prices work against the reader's argument. You may sell more CDs at $3 than at $20, but are you really going to sell 10x as many? (and this ignores the fact that it probably costs $2 to manufacture and ship the CD).

I have no doubt that people will still support musicians or websites if the data was available for free. But now, as I said before, you are relying on altruism. A lot of people do donate to charity, but they tend to donate a very small portion of their income (something like 1% or less in the US). Furthermore, most people need to be shamed into donating. As I mentioned before, charity is a tragedy of the commons. It is irrational from a game theory perspective, and thus you have to exploit the irrational side of human nature. This means leveraging personal relationships to get someone to support your walk-a-thon, or having to walk past the veteran in the supermarket entrance without making eye contact. In the impersonal world of the Internet, it's going to be much more difficult to get someone to contribute.

I think I've gone on about long enough. About the OP's book. Sure, you may buy a paper copy of it that you wouldn't have bought otherwise, but consider the big picture. There's only a limited amount of time that you can spend reading. Will you buy every single book you read on the Internet, or only half or a third of them. What about consumers such as students who have limited sources of income. That never stopped them from buying books (or CDs for that matter) in the past, but they certainly don't do so voluntarily.

-a

Jakob has already covered these things.

And offers some solutions.

Jakob has already covered these things.

And offers some solutions.

Jakob has already covered these things.

And offers some solutions.

Jakob has already covered these things.

And offers some solutions.

Speaking of Amex, what the heck is the woman illustrated in #7 wearing??

Is she at work? What kind of work? What she got on underneath?

I guess I was the only one who just looks at the pictures. :) Is this a hidden insight into Nielson's mind?

A comment more on-topic: I like Nielson's points on what NOT to do; but his design edicts seem really dreary, such as the path at the top of the page, the dearth of color, the overly-large type, the drab layout....

As many people have mentioned, the site hosting this article is straining under the load of geeks looking for more material to turn into running gags. I think I managed to find the reason for this site's poor performance - a lack of high speed internet access.

From Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth (1998):

Nielsen's Law of Internet bandwidth states that:

• 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

The dots in the diagram show the various speeds with which I have connected to the Net, from an early acoustic 300 bps modem in 1984 to an ISDN line today. It is amazing how closely the empirical data fits the exponential growth curve for the 50% annualized growth stated by Nielsen's Law.

...

Starting about 2003, high-end users will have speeds corresponding to a personal T-1 line.

...

Of course, low-end users will be on ISDN lines in 2003, so high-end users' megabit access will still not sanction bloated design. Looking even further ahead, Nielsen's Law does predict that the Web will be 57 times faster in ten years.

It is amazing how easy it is to get an accurate approximation of the trend of internet connectivity speed from seven data points representing one person's internet connection speed over a span of 15 years.

So the site might not be responding well right now, but at least we get broadband next year...

It's interesting to compare the previous versions (linked below the main article here and here

I particularly liked: 1999:

Slow Server Response Times

"Slow response times are the worst offender against Web usability: in my survey of the original "top-ten" mistakes, major sites had a truly horrifying 84% violation score with respect to the response time rule."

Took me a couple of minutes for that to download

In 1996, we had Overly Long Download Times

The previous version are Cached by google,
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:pj5FFl38-pE C:www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:tgqi1bumb78 C:www.useit.com/alertbox/990530.html+&hl=en&ie=UTF -8

It's interesting to compare the previous versions (linked below the main article here and here

I particularly liked: 1999:

Slow Server Response Times

"Slow response times are the worst offender against Web usability: in my survey of the original "top-ten" mistakes, major sites had a truly horrifying 84% violation score with respect to the response time rule."

Took me a couple of minutes for that to download

In 1996, we had Overly Long Download Times

The previous version are Cached by google,
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:pj5FFl38-pE C:www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:tgqi1bumb78 C:www.useit.com/alertbox/990530.html+&hl=en&ie=UTF -8

These days I find fewer and fewer public and commercial websites that are relying on framesets for layout and navigation. IMHO, this is a good thing. However, I have noticed that a large number of web-based interfaces for commercial, enterprise-oriented applications, as well as many internal enterprise websites/web-applications, tend to rely very heavily on framesets.

I would like to see Nielsen revisit his 1996 critique of frames, perhaps exploring some of the technologies (PHP, JSP, ASP etc.*) that have provided better solutions to the problems frames initially tried to correct (dynamic navigation/content, rich GUI interface, etc.).

* While dynamic, server-generated content was around in 1996 (cgi, ssi, and shtml), it was not as widespread, nor was it as readily available to the average web-designer/developer.

Also, the content on his content-related weblog The Nublog is pretty interesting.

He may be abrasive sometimes, but he usually gets it right. Moreso than Jakob Neilsen.

Slashdot Editors, please read this: Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines

You might get more people to take out paid subscriptions if you offered a more professional service.

I'm a medical writer so I can comment on the medical content of the sites in the Consumer Webwatch reports. I don't think they're good enough.

(Since I write for the web, I found the programmer comments very useful. OK, I'll change that code in my site RSN).

I agree completely that (my) content doesn't matter if you can't find it, and without good graphic design, backed up by good programming (thanks guys), you can't find anything on those web sites (which have thousands of pages). Everything you want to know about medicine is on the Internet many times over, but the problem is (1) finding it (2) in a form that you can understand and (3)evaluating its accuracy and validity.

Here's a good example: I went to a doctor for a checkup, and he didn't perform a digital rectal examination, although he did give me a guiac test. A DRE is a way of screening for prostate cancer and rectal cancer, and the American Cancer Society among other well-known organizations recommends it for everyone above 50, like me. A guiac test samples the stool for blood, which is often a symptom of colon cancer. Various organizations also recommend sigmoidoscopy (a fiber optic scope that goes through the rectum and up the colon about a foot) and colonoscopy (which goes up the colon even farther) as screening for colon cancer. My medical textbooks were either out of date or ambiguous on these issues.

So, here's my question for the medical web sites:

Should my doctor have performed a DRE on a 50-year-old man in a routine physical?

My first stop was the web site rated No. 1 by the experts National Institutes of Health. Once I got there, I realized that I had to refine the question. What I really wanted to know is,

would a DRE have lowered my chances of dying of cancer?

As it turned out, there are scientific studies with control groups that found that there was no good evidence that patients who had screening DRE, sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy lived longer than patients who did not. However, patients screened with guiac tests did live longer (endpoint of death, they call it). I found this on the professional side of the site, not the consumer side, couched in technical language. Not easily accessible or understandable -- for something that your life depends on.

So when I read the Consumer WebWatch report, I decided to see how the expert's No. 2, MayoClinic.com handled it. To my surprise and dismay, the Mayo Clinic web site, in its extensive discussion of screening for colon cancer, did not make the point that only guiac testing had been shown to save lives. There is criticism in the medical literature that doctors don't provide enough hard information to their patients to enable patients to make an intelligent decision. I think the fact that the life-saving ability of 3 of those 4 screening tests is not supported by evidence-based medicine is an important fact for patients that the Mayo clinic should have provided for patients who are trying to decide whether to take an uncomfortable and (for the scopes) expensive test with a risk of perforating the bowel.

Evidence-based medicine, BTW, is a term of the art, and a good Google search. It means practicing medicine on the basis of scientific evidence, when it exists (the catch: you wind up saying, "science doesn't know" too much of the time).

EBM started when 2 doctors in Canada were having trouble keeping up with all their reading, and said, "Hey, let's just read the stuff that's supported by scientific evidence." That cut down the pile significantly.

A good explanation is on the Bandolier web site, from Oxford, UK. This will reduce medicine to the rationality that engineers and other geeks are used to thinking in.

What is series:
Evidence-based Medicine

Bandolier

Forms of evidence
Evidence is presented in many forms, and it is
important to understand the basis on which it
is stated. The value of evidence can be ranked
according to the following classification in
descending order of credibility:

I. Strong evidence from at least one
systematic review of multiple well-designed
randomised controlled trials.

II. Strong evidence from at least one properly
designed randomised controlled trial of
appropriate size.

III. Evidence from well-designed trials such as
non-randomised trials, cohort studies, time
series or matched case-controlled studies.

IV. Evidence from well-designed
non-experimental studies from more than
one centre or research group.

V. Opinions of respected authorities, based on
clinical evidence, descriptive studies or
reports of expert committees.

BTW, when people ask me where to find medical information on the Internet, I recommend peer-reviewed sources, starting with the Merck Manual Home Edition , then British Medical Journal, then Medicalstudent.com.

But you can't do it on the Internet alone without professional guidance -- medical librarians explained to me how to search the medical literature. And very often what you want to know is only available on paper.

I went into this in more detail when I taught a class in medical journalism. I interviewed a medical librarian and posted her explanation in an article on my web site. That's why brick libraries are so valuable -- they don't just have paper, they have librarians.

Lots of pages look better without the vertical scrollbar space.

...just as most pages render better without the viewframe width changing as content length changes.

Having the wdith stay the same as height changes so that CSS percentiles work as expected is not the same as always having a scrollbar. In fact, I'd say the majority of HTML will expect the right margin to stay put, regardless of the length of the page, given that most designers (rightly) let the height be "auto", but strictly control width. People hate scrolling sideways. They don't mind scrolling down. This is just good design.

So why not make the browser-specific property be the inverse? Why don't we assume that the scrollbar could potentially take up the 10 pixels (or whatever) on the right (or left!), and have a property to invert this for the pages that absolutely need those 10 pixels? Why can't those pixels be render transparently when the scrollbar is not there? I assert that this is the minority, and the norm is to expect to scroll through the height.

Plainly put, I argue that the scrollbar is not part of the contents, but part of the application, and as such, should keep it's bloody paws off my content.

VRML is/was quite cool - I did work on a VRML viewer using OpenGL for an internship. Unfortunately after all they hype it never went very far, the large download sizes really hurt it's acceptance. Datafiles were one huge honkin' text file. The structure was nice and pretty easy to parse though. That was a fun project to work on.

Buy a book, try stuff out - learn to love CSS. Visit UseIt too.

Actually, the newest Flash version has capabilities for disabled people. the Nielsen Norman Group helped them in adapting the product for different target groups.

The latest Alertbox of Jacob Nielsen talks about Making Flash Usable for Users With Disabilities - also the subject of a tutorial at Macromedia DevCon in Orlando.

Um, fuck off. Microsoft has one of the most prestigious HCI laboratories in the world. Jakob Nielsen confirms this.

I guess New Scientist have not been listening to Neilsen...

Let users control font size :(

Without keywords tag, you are left with e.g. this solution (scroll down to the bottom of the page). Not pretty, but search-engine compliant, huh?

Perhaps a better way would be to index these tags with low priority, as some search engines still do. This way, the keywords would only matter if there aren't many other pages with them (misspellings and rare terms), or in conjunction with visible text (variants and attributes). Well, a search engine can check misspelling of common words, but not rare terms and proper names. Both ways, the tags would be hard to abuse while useful in certain searches.

The laziness is working against this (why bother with something which is not visible on the page?), but without meta tags the Web is becoming dummier, in a way. Hope the search engines will master technology to replace them, but it's not quite there yet!

Even a 486 will run a browser that supports stylesheets. You'll just have to let go of the romantic notion that it's still 1996... it's called progress.

Yet another self-centeret edu kid, with an IQ of a dead rat and perfect vision no doubt. Its not called progress, its called regression - now hundreds, if not thousands of websites are unreadable to me and millions of others, because people use stylesheets badly.

Jakob Nielsen, who CNN called "Web usability guru" puts it this way:

Because most webdesigners use absolute font size, which means you can't resize it in browsers. Ie, you are stuck with a font size which is often too small (it is for me most of the time).

Jakob Nielsen (who you should know if you are a regular slashdot reader, if not search the slashdot archives), the man CNN calls "Web usability guru" (ironically they do it wrong as well), will tell you why Stylesheets "reduced readability of an increasing number of websites" - He will also tell you how to do it right. - Basically doing it right is to specify percentage weights so that the stylesheets DO cascade, instead of taking over.
Some sites who do it wrong:

http://www.cnn.com
http://www.microsoft.com
ht tp://www.nvidia.com
http://www.asus.com.tw/
http ://www.wiseeye.com/
http://www.syfyportal.com/

Why wrong? Because you can't adjust the font size in MSIE (its possible you use a minority browser which allows you to do this, but 99% of webusers can not adjust the size)

So you can argue the tag shouldn't read "don't use stylesheets" but "use stylesheets properly" - but that wouldn't work, everone thinks that he is using them properly and only the others do it wrong. Its a soundbite - and its not entirely wrong, almost all of the unreadable websites are unreadable because the "webmaster" was using stylesheets.

Even a 486 will run a browser that supports stylesheets. You'll just have to let go of the romantic notion that it's still 1996... it's called progress.

Yet another self-centeret edu kid, with an IQ of a dead rat and perfect vision no doubt. Its not called progress, its called regression - now hundreds, if not thousands of websites are unreadable to me and millions of others, because people use stylesheets badly.

Jakob Nielsen, who CNN called "Web usability guru" puts it this way:

Because most webdesigners use absolute font size, which means you can't resize it in browsers. Ie, you are stuck with a font size which is often too small (it is for me most of the time).

Jakob Nielsen (who you should know if you are a regular slashdot reader, if not search the slashdot archives), the man CNN calls "Web usability guru" (ironically they do it wrong as well), will tell you why Stylesheets "reduced readability of an increasing number of websites" - He will also tell you how to do it right. - Basically doing it right is to specify percentage weights so that the stylesheets DO cascade, instead of taking over.
Some sites who do it wrong:

http://www.cnn.com
http://www.microsoft.com
ht tp://www.nvidia.com
http://www.asus.com.tw/
http ://www.wiseeye.com/
http://www.syfyportal.com/

Why wrong? Because you can't adjust the font size in MSIE (its possible you use a minority browser which allows you to do this, but 99% of webusers can not adjust the size)

So you can argue the tag shouldn't read "don't use stylesheets" but "use stylesheets properly" - but that wouldn't work, everone thinks that he is using them properly and only the others do it wrong. Its a soundbite - and its not entirely wrong, almost all of the unreadable websites are unreadable because the "webmaster" was using stylesheets.

>Why do you think style sheets make web pages unreadable?

You wouldn't be a young fellow with an expensive monitor would you?

>Do you even know what style sheets are?

Of course, how else would i know they are the bane of the WWW today:

Because most webdesigners use absolute font size, which means you can't resize it in browsers. Ie, you are stuck with a font size which is often too small (it is for me most of the time).

Jakob Nielsen (who you should know if you are a regular slashdot reader, if not search the slashdot archives), the man CNN calls "Web usability guru" (ironically they do it wrong as well), will tell you why Stylesheets "reduced readability of an increasing number of websites" - He will also tell you how to do it right. - Basically doing it right is to specify percentage weights so that the stylesheets DO cascade, instead of taking over.
Some sites who do it wrong:

http://www.cnn.com
http://www.microsoft.com
ht tp://www.nvidia.com
http://www.asus.com.tw/
http ://www.wiseeye.com/
http://www.syfyportal.com/

>Why do you think style sheets make web pages unreadable?

You wouldn't be a young fellow with an expensive monitor would you?

>Do you even know what style sheets are?

Of course, how else would i know they are the bane of the WWW today:

Because most webdesigners use absolute font size, which means you can't resize it in browsers. Ie, you are stuck with a font size which is often too small (it is for me most of the time).

Jakob Nielsen (who you should know if you are a regular slashdot reader, if not search the slashdot archives), the man CNN calls "Web usability guru" (ironically they do it wrong as well), will tell you why Stylesheets "reduced readability of an increasing number of websites" - He will also tell you how to do it right. - Basically doing it right is to specify percentage weights so that the stylesheets DO cascade, instead of taking over.
Some sites who do it wrong:

http://www.cnn.com
http://www.microsoft.com
ht tp://www.nvidia.com
http://www.asus.com.tw/
http ://www.wiseeye.com/
http://www.syfyportal.com/

Ok, first, big points to you for actually seeming objective. This looks like a pretty decent summary of what the big stink has been over.

but on to my comments...

Someone buy Havoc Pennington a Jacob Nielsen book.

Heh... I'll take Havoc's opinion's on usability any day of the week over Jakob's. If fear to think what an OS designed by Jakob would look like... probably like a Mac, but with about 1/10th the features, and a keyboard with only 1 button, because more buttons is too distracting and confusing. Not that he doesn't have a point, but Jakob seems willing to utterly forsake anything that stands in the way of *his* view of usability. Can you imagine how dull the would be if every page looked like this?

Ask anyone involved in usability - double click makes no sense.

No, it makes sense. It's certainly suboptimal, but I don't think it's nonsensical. I like to think of double-clicking in terms of what JWZ once said about Linux - to paraphrase: It isn't that Linux doesn't suck, it's that it sucks less than the alternatives. I think double-clicking falls firmly into this catagory of "sucks less". Yeah, it does suck, but the alternative of having people* suffer through a metric double fuckload false positive single-clicks sucks so much worse. Most newbies, whom single-click is really aimed at, never use their file manager anyhow, and never will, no matter how "easy" it is. What they will use is a file selector in an application, something that KDE has the upper hand on for the moment. It's a little cluttered, but it's pretty good. Thankfully, the major flaws in the GTK+ standard file selector are worked out (ie: it doesn't erase fscking file names when you change paths), but I'm really anticipating the introduction of a new and improved one with GTK+ 2.4, which is when it's tentatively slated to ship with.

*myself included - I'm a self-proclaimed single-click hater. That's my NUMBER ONE gripe about Konqueror. There are other things, but that, I could not stand.

These types of links are called deep links .

There has already been quite a lot of controversy regarding deep links, dating all the way back to 1999.

In fact, one major free website hosting company, whose name escapes me at the moment, does not allow you to deep link to their members' pages. Instead, you are forced to go to that member's home page first (I imagine that they are checking for referers or some such thing).

Clearly, deep linking is beneficial, but some companies just don't get it.

and it is considered good design factor, but it is also of questionable legality, at least in some major parts of the world (the EU, for instance). I still much prefer it, but attempting to make people do stuff that has questionable legality is ... not a good idea.

PS. I know that both the links in my posting are deep links - go figure :-)

As detailed by this article, the web is not like Network TV, never will be, and trying to emulate the business model of the TV Networks will fail.

Banner Ads will not cover the cost of equipment and bandwidth. And even if they do NOW, they won't SOON... this Alertbox article by respected Internet Usability guy Jacob Neilson talks about why web advertising does not work. The article was writtin in 1997, but it has comments at the bottom keeping it up to date.

Banner ads are slowly dying. Basing a long term business model on them is a bad idea.

"Another example of harmful Web technology comes with the increasing use of style sheets, which let web designers specify the exact size of text down to the pixel. Unfortunately, many designers are using this ability, leading to reduced readability of an increasing number of websites. "

are 0.1% of website authors Jakob Nielsen?

What do developers mean by "backward compatibility?" They mean using non-standard, proprietary (or deprecated) markup and code to ensure that every visitor has the same experience, whether they're sporting Netscape Navigator 1.0 or IE6. Held up as a Holy Grail of professional development practice, "backward compatibility" sounds good in theory. But the cost is too high and the practice has always been based on a lie.

Visiting Netscape's page pops up a BIG HUGE ad for Netscape 7.

See mistake #10

On the other hand, Gordon Kurtenbach and Bill Buxton have done a huge amount of valuable emperical research and commercial product development with pie menus, gesture recognition and other topics. They designed the Alias|Wavefront Maya user interface, so it's no surprise that it uses marking menus (which they call their gestural modifications to pie menus).

And of course Ben Shneiderman also talks about pie menus a lot, and writes about them in his books.

-Don