On Monday 12 September 2011 22:19:04, Forgeot Eric wrote : > The drupal website is using blue link, but with a different color than the > blue which was common during the geocities era: the design is classy and > elegant, yet it's simple
For me the Geocities era was more about blinking and scrolling text, animated GIFs, tiled background images and lots of "under construction" and "optimized for MSIE" signs. :-) I'll only comment on colored underlined links. I mostly agree that we could improve the homepage and the documentation. Contrary to what has been said, the default PmWiki skin does *not* force the color or the decoration of links, visitors can configure their browsers to show the links the way they prefer seeing links. There are many usability studies about how people behave on a website or intranet=wiki. By "people" I mean normal readers and editors who have some ordinary task (find a specific information or change some text), neither site admins, nor style designers, nor top users very experienced with the software or the website structure. It might be interesting for a site owner, for an admin or for a skin designer to keep themselves informed about the findings of these studies, for example: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ Links need to be easily differentiated from other text, this is a usability need and also common sense if you know how people read. It is acceptable to have undecorated links in menus, sidebars and lists of links, but in a page body it should be clear what is a link: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040510.html (This was observed in 2004, and our eyes and brains haven't evolved too much since then.) The "underlined" part is not a requirement but it is recommended as it is helpful for color-blind users, users with lower vision, or just older people like most of us become every day. People do not read web pages like they read printed text. People "scan" a web page looking for keywords, and those keywords are the first 2-3 words of a paragraph, bold or italic words, and links. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html While this was written in 1997, today with thousands if not millions *times* more websites, with better search engines, with information overload, lack of time and more experience or habit of the internet, users read even less today than in 1997. These conclusions are still current, even more accented, as you can see in publications about more recent studies, eg. this from 2008: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html > http://drupal.org/documentation/customization/tutorials/beginners-cookbook > > The same goes for this localized version: http://drupalfr.org/documentation Both these documentation sites have a defect: visited and unvisited links look the same way. This is a major usability problem, especially for large sites (lots of pages, lot of information) and the Top 3 worse design mistake of all times. When people search for something, if they don't know which pages they have already visited, they turn in circles, visiting the same pages again and again, and getting frustrated. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040503.html http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html > There are some trends in webdesign. It's not a shame to follow them, > especially for a publishing tool. The current design is at least 6 year > old: http://web.archive.org/web/20050913023010/http://pmwiki.org/ It would be a shame if following a fashion kills function and usability both for editors and for readers. But I'd think it was caused by ignorance (lack of information or lack of interest) rather than, say, stupidity. It is fixable. Petko P.S. I've been involved with a quite large wiki community (50-200 experienced, intelligent editors active weekly, 100K+ pages, thousands of readers). Since 2003 the links were like on pmwiki, browser-default which in most browsers is underlined and blue. Every once in a while, a newcomer editor or even a visitor (this is a fairly democratic community) comes to tell us that he doesn't like underlined links and that we are retarded to use them. The community rejected by a vote one proposition to force non-underlined links, and we also held a poll open to editors and to readers and the results were not conclusive: most active editors stated that they preferred underlined links, and about half of the unregistered visitors who voted too. I should add that last year the site owner unilaterally and without consulting the community (or the web usability guidelines) changed the default skin and links now are no longer underlined. But as editors can set in their personal preferences underlined links, and even switch back to the old skin, nobody bothered to organize a protest or another vote. :-) _______________________________________________ pmwiki-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.pmichaud.com/mailman/listinfo/pmwiki-users
