| Alan J. Flavell 2005-09-13, 7:47 pm |
| On Tue, 13 Sep 2005, Gianni Rondinini wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Sep 2005 13:25:31 -0400, Stan Brown
> <the_stan_brown@fastmail.fm> wrote:
>
>
> i know it, but very often people complains about xposting.
Please inform yourself (off-group) about netiquette conventions,
instead of abusing these groups for pointless bluster about them.
(I would certainly complain about cross-posting to an excessive number
of groups that were only vaguely related to the topic of the posting,
but that surely wasn't the issue here.)
> as murphy says, "when there are 2 ways to do something, the one you
> choose is the..."
If a topic is genuinely relevant to two relatively unrelated groups,
then cross-posting is fine (multiposting of course is never OK!).
> but the funny thing is that, by now, nobody was able to tell me how to
> do it :)
That's not funny. You've now lost all context, and the prospect for
the hoped-for technical discussion has faded.
AIUI you were asking about Windows Update pages, right?
Anyway, as I found when MSIE was broken on one of the machines I was
trying to fix, and trying to fix it by visiting MS Update without
using MSIE: a visit with any other browser is greeted with a rather
brief get-lost, so we aren't really talking about a WWW page here.
> or that nobody thinks it's a good layout, but i don't see why.
It's got scrollbars all over the place when opened in my preferred
window size. Well, OK: I count 3 of the damned things right now, but
that's at least two more than I want, and 3 more than I need. My
window is plenty large enough for the content, but MS won't use it:
instead they leave lots of empty space in some areas, and force
scrollbars in others. Wibble.
Oh, and if I pretend to be sight-impaired, and increase the text size
to Largest, some of the content disappears off into inscrollable
oblivion. Double ungood. It's also managed to throw a fourth
scrollbar. BUT there's still plenty of unused real-estate.
Give me flexible design in preference!
Even for a web application designed exclusively to be used from one
graphical browser-like object, this is sub-optimal (and that's an
understatement, IMHO). As a model for designing a web page, it's
utterly unsuitable, I'd say.
> i mean: we're moving more and more from traditional local
> applications to centralized webapps. when you install and use an
> application, you have your menus, tollbars, scrollbars and so on.
But, looking at the MS windows update page, it's evidently utterly
dependent on full-scale execution of javascript. This would be very,
very inappropriate for a WWW page, quite apart from the criticisms I
already mentioned.
When designing a web page, one needs to be more generic: stop thinking
in terms of making specific visual widgets appear in specific places,
think in terms of functionality, and leave it to the client agent to
implement those functions in the way that it implements them (and that
its users are accustomed to it implementing them).
Scrollbars, "pulldowns", etc. might be implemented by a client agent
(browser), or not. Lynx has no scrollbars as such. What would a
scrollbar or "pulldown" sound like on a speaking browser?
Proposing a visual styling via CSS is fine in its way, but there are
advantages in the fact that some client agents don't care to action
those proposals when they relate to user-interface widgets, given that
the user already knows the appearance of the local widgets and how to
use them. There's the risk, with some other kinds of browser, that the
widgets can be camouflaged via CSS to look like something else than
they really are, fooling the user to perform some action which they
hadn't intended.
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