Hi Terrence,
My post was not a personal attack on Nick, nor was it dismissive of his
POV. Admittedly, I got the impression he was struggling to come up
with an
example of how alertbox is difficult to use and perhaps that has
tainted
my message, but I was genuinely interested in whether he truely wanted
to
select his articles based primarily on date.
I wouldn't say I was struggling at all. I would agree I was looking for
a sensible, grown-up alternative to the kind of honest, gut-reaction
that I get when I look at that site. I would say the poor visual
quality does not encourage me to revisit the site when there are plenty
of alternatives on the web that provide as good information that is
also pleasant to use.
Also for more perspective, I am interested in what Jakob Nielsen has to
say. For example I just recently listened to an interview with him on
ITconversations.com. So really what my reply to you was doing was
actually stopping and trying to work out why I rarely visit his website.
I never said that date based scanning was irrelevant - I stated that,
in
this case, it was secondary to the title, and in fact pointed out what
(in
my view) the purpose of the dates were.
Well, I also had in my head the fact that in a dynamic site you can
link table headers to sort their columns, which in this apparently
"static" site was not an option, so I was probably thinking ahead a bit
too much. In any case the point of the table was to have the user go,
e.g.:
I want to scan by title so I go down the title column, then across the
description to see if the article was relevant, then to the date to see
how up-to-date the information may be...or down the date column, etc.
In other words using it exactly as a table is meant to be used.
Oh and I didn't feel you were personally attacking me,
Nick
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