At 14:50 +0000 UTC, on 2006-01-22, James Graham wrote: [...]
> If I understood correctly, the problem that is being solved is loosely > "websites all look different and so are hard to navigate". Am I correct? Yes. [...] > 1. It doesn't make sites consistent. Even if we only consider > display:meta being used to create native menus from navigation lists, > each site would still have totally different items in a totally > different order. In desktop applications, the consistency comes not so > much from the fact that all menu bars look the same and appear in the > same place (though that is important) Not just important but probably the most important aspect of it. Forget that you might have to study the contents of a menu if you even can't locate the menu in the first place. > but from the fact that it is > possible to guess which items will be in which popup and what the > function of each item will be (e.g. the Edit menu will _always_ start > Undo, Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste... assuming those actions are supported by > the application). But as you say: "assuming those actions are supported by the application". In desktop apps too menu items differ per app, because different apps are for different kinds of things. The example of most applications having undo, cut, copy, paste can be translated to most Web pages having links to home, help, search, index, etc. When provided through the LINK element, browsers that provide a LINKs Toolbar today already present such 'menu items' in the same way and place consistently across sites. [...] > 2. It violates the mental separation between browser and site. My > experience when using the firefox link toolbar is that, even on the rare > occasions where it was populated with useful entries _at_all_ I was more > likely to use the on site navigation controls, simply because I wasn't > looking in the browser chrome for a site-specific control. I guess many > people would experience the same problem. I think this is very much a matter of being conditioned. If LINK would have been properly supported (by both browsers and authors) from the start you might have been conditioned to always look there first. -- Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>
