On our intranet site, I am creating a couple pages for departments to
place commonly-used forms (in .DOC and .PDF format) for users to
download.
 
Some of the forms we use are multi-part forms that cannot be downloaded,
obviously.  However, the departments still want these forms listed on
the page with the other downloadable forms.
 
But, wait.  They *do* want these forms to be clickable.  Whenever a user
clicks the link for one of the multi-part forms, the dept wants me to
display a basic Word doc that says "Sorry, this form is not available
for download.  Please order the form at...."
 
To me, that is totally ridiculous.  So, my alternative was to put a
small comment, below each non-downloadable form, that says, "The form,
listed above, is not available online. Please order the form at..."
 
My justification is that the user can immediately see the comment and
have no need to click further.
 
If I turn this into a clickable link, that opens a Word doc, I'm sure
the users will be pissed that they had to go to the trouble of clicking
the link, saving the file (or just opening it) and then opening Word
only to find they have been hornswaggled.  My opinion is why put the
user through the extra steps?
 
Then, the dept has another alternative.  They want me to use a "title"
attribute so that when the user hovers over a link, the tooltip will say
"This form is not available online...."
 
I don't care for that solution because nothing will inform the user to
hover long enough for the tooltip to appear.
 
What are your thoughts on this?
 
M!chael A Dawson
Manager of Web Applications
Office of Technology Services
University of Evansville
1800 Lincoln Avenue
Evansville, IN 47722
812-488-2581
MSN Messenger ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 
"There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary
numbers and those who don't."
 


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