Geoff Deering wrote:
It's not a philosophical difference here, it amazes me that this is the
perspective you draw, because it's clearly a difference of understanding
and interpreting the impact of standard interface design elements when
they clash with interface design conventions for communicating the state
of the user interface. It's not a philosophical issue, it's clearly a
functional issue.
I see it as philosophical divide in this context: is a web page creating
its own experience and UI, self contained and - sometimes - distinct
from the OS that is displaying it, or should a web page integrate
seamlessly with the user's OS as if it was a native application? Yes,
form controls are (to simplify) delegated by the browser to the OS,
which serves the second viewpoint but not the first.
No user agent I know of currently has this capacity to abstract form
elements styles. So this isn't something one can recommend.
I'm not recommending that designers can rely on the user agent to take
care of it...but arguing that it's time once again to give browser
developers a gentle kick to implement more functionality as laid out in
UAAG. It seems that, beyond a very low baseline, browsers have dumped
the onus back on the web developers / authors, and I'd like to see more
happening on the user agent front. For one, user customisation options
should be prominent and easy to access/use, not buried deep within
obscure dialogs...which would then also make it more realistic to expect
users themselves to set up their own browsing environment to suit their
needs. A trivial and unrelated example (which I may already have
mentioned...can't remember) would be my little Firefox text size toolbar
to have font sizing options directly and prominently in the browser's
interface http://www.splintered.co.uk/experiments/70/ - if this type of
functionality was available and visible by default in FF, it would make
any text sizing widgets that some web developers have now started to add
to their sites redundant - but currently the argument goes "it's a neat
idea to provide the widget on the page, as most users don't even know
they can resize their text". Or, again unrelated, how about a sensible
and user friendly way to access longdesc on images? Why do browsers make
it pretty much impossible to access this image attribute?
http://www.splintered.co.uk/experiments/55/
If designers are depending on users to override designs elements that
conflict with standard interactive design conventions, I feel their
fundamental approach to design is flawed, because they are not putting
the basic principles of the design of the interface of device interact
as a primary consideration.
I'm not saying they should depend on users to override settings...just
that *if* users do end up having a problem even with a judiciously,
carefully implemented design choice, that the browsers should allow them
an easy way to override this aspect. I'm thinking of the fallback
mechanisms that, IMHO, should be in place at the user agent end, rather
than saying that designers should consider every possible scenario or
just not use styling at all.
As for your last statement, are designers well aware of this particular
issue? It seems from the discussion here they are not, and as I have
mentioned before, it is therefore important to highlight this problem,
because many designers try follow standard so they don't inflict
miscommunication on users,
And that is the angle that is keeping me posting here...the more we talk
about it, the more the awareness (hopefully not just between the two of
us, but other designers coming across these posts) we raise. :)
and the sad thing is that this particular
issue, I feel has not been address properly in web standards.
But is it a "standards" issue, or is it a usability + design issue? I.e.
by making it a "standards" issue, it seems to imply that we'll have
stringent, rigid, dogmatic guidelines that would go beyond the remit of
"web standards". We also don't have standards on things like "never make
your H1 smaller than your H2" or similar, but leave it up to the common
sense of web authors/designers.
Software development and particularly web
development are rich in history of these types of misunderstandings and
implementation.
Linking back to my philosophical question at the beginning: is web
development a subset of software development, or is it - for lack of a
better term - the development of an "experience". A related point from
that: should web applications (functional, intranet-type apps) still
have their own "feel" or integrate seamlessly (from a visual standpoint)
with the OS?
And...what am I still doing up at 3am? Sheesh...time flies
P
--
Patrick H. Lauke
__________________________________________________________
re·dux (adj.): brought back; returned. used postpositively
[latin : re-, re- + dux, leader; see duke.]
www.splintered.co.uk | www.photographia.co.uk
http://redux.deviantart.com
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http://webstandards.org/
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