121–130 of 271 posts
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There's an easy fix for folks like yourself: most (all?) modern browsers support setting a minimum font size. Jack that up way into the double digits, and stop justifying ridiculously large font sizes for everyone.
Sure. Explain that to my mother.
I'm still looking for "just use links". So many frontends I see use fancy onclicks to emulate links (including updating window.location). However they are either not links or are void links. This breaks all sorts of useful things (copy link location, open in new tab &c.).
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> The point being that the file input button doesn’t look like any other button on their website. But hey, why solve a problem when you can force the entire world to accommodate it? Why don't the buttons on your website look like HIG-compliant buttons on whatever platform the user is using? That's what web chrome looked like back in the aughts and it was fantastic. Apparently you can still do it: https://developer.mo…
Question, is the point of HIG-compliance to make everything look exactly the same on a platform? Or is it to nail down some abstract sense of what makes UI intuitive to use? It seems like people with this viewpoint pay lip service to the latter goal, which allows for trends like Material Design so long as they fit with the guidelines, while really wanting the former, which to me looks like nothing more than tilting a…
> “The purpose of visual consistency is to construct a believable environment for users… The transfer of skills is one of the most important benefits of a consistent interface, especially for beginning users.” pg. 10
> “…consistency makes it easier for a user to learn new applications; it also makes it less likely that a user who follows habits learned from one application will make a disastrous mistake when using a different one.” pg. xi
The HIG goes beyond simply expressing principles of what makes for a good UI. The consistency in and of itself allows users to develop an intuition and muscle memory for how their computer will work. That intuition is destroyed when different apps look and behave differently. In that sense, it's better to be less intuitive according to some abstract principle if necessary to achieve consistency. It will take the user longer to understand a "more intuitive" UI starting from first principles than to understand a UI that exhibits the quirks embedded in the HIG they already know.
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I agree for cases where the text is supposed to behave like a hyperlink - it should be one. But in cases where its behaviour is that of a button (even a button which has the appearance of blue text - think iOS) then onclick is a good choice. Especially for contexts where “open in new tab” makes no sense. I can’t see any valid reason for using a void link - worst of both worlds?
I recall reading a story about someone who had implemented some sort of table using links for actions. At some point the app data mysteriously got wiped out. Turned out a user had Alexa toolbar installed and it crawled the "delete" links on each row (as well as all the pagination links)...
http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2005-10-25-google-web-accelera...
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It's worth considering that one of the many, many wonderful things about the modern internet and modern browsers is that you don't have to sit and wait passively for someone to deliver the experience you want to you. You have everything you need to make Firefox or Chromium do it for you! Then you can share it with others, and they can have the automagic, fresh-from-the-box, on-by-default experience you would like.
I've been doing this internet thing for nearly 25 years now. I'm not ignorant of all the things I can do on the "modern" internet or browsers. I'm not waiting around passively for someone to deliver experiences I want--I build software, ffs. I made a simple statement about what I wish browsers did by default . That means no extensions. That means that--unless I'm going to fork a browser to build it myself--building y…
I fully understood your comment, your point, and your desire. I was attempting to encourage you (and anyone less experienced reading along at home) to push the world that exists in the direction of the world you want, rather than imply any ignorance on your part.
It's far, far too easy for people to treat technology as artifacts handed down from the gods that can only be passively accepted.
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Question, is the point of HIG-compliance to make everything look exactly the same on a platform? Or is it to nail down some abstract sense of what makes UI intuitive to use? It seems like people with this viewpoint pay lip service to the latter goal, which allows for trends like Material Design so long as they fit with the guidelines, while really wanting the former, which to me looks like nothing more than tilting a…
The point of the HIG is to make everything look and work the same on the platform: https://blog.prototypr.io/rediscovering-apples-human-interfa... > “The purpose of visual consistency is to construct a believable environment for users… The transfer of skills is one of the most important benefits of a consistent interface, especially for beginning users.” pg. 10 > “…consistency makes it easier for a user to learn new…
Reading this article made me realize what it is that's broken about the concept of semantic markup and why websites even today are div soup. It's the same reason why divs won in the first place. You can't dictate the shape of a document to people and it be anything other than a kludge. Take the site I work on, Great Big Story[1]. We have sections and headers, but our content isn't defined by text, it's defined by gra…
The whole debate between semantic markup and visual styling in CSS looks to me to be a massive exercise in people yelling past each other and needlessly making all life difficult. I've ranted about this before, but worse is that everyone insists on trying to go with the default flow of elements as much as they can. Example I used last time was that it is actually easy to layout things and have them look pretty solid…
I suspect if I performed the same test in my 1440p 27" monitor, I'd have a surprisingly similar problem, of overly small text in a small box in the centre.
So in reality, while it may have made it super simple to preserve the shape of the Rubik's cube unfolded, it's impeded reading the main content on anything outside the range of a plus side phone to a Macbook's scaled 1440x900 canvas. And really the Rubik's cube could have been just a image (an SVG if you're worried about sharp or selectable text).
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Breaking it is completely unnecessary too, even with single page apps. It's not all that hard to build a React or Angular apps that use proper links along with the browser history API. Designed properly, the apps should be able to load their state and render correctly even when deep-linked to somewhere other than the app's top level. This isn't a new concern - I remember paying attention to this back in the old days…
It's such an extremely simple litmus test: if it breaks the back button of the browser, it's the wrong design. The closest thing to an exception being cases where one needs to be logged in to see a page, or when links are consciously invalidated for some other reason. And even then the website/webapp should still just signal this to the user without a bazillion redirects.
I'm still looking for "just use links". So many frontends I see use fancy onclicks to emulate links (including updating window.location). However they are either not links or are void links. This breaks all sorts of useful things (copy link location, open in new tab &c.).
I agree for cases where the text is supposed to behave like a hyperlink - it should be one. But in cases where its behaviour is that of a button (even a button which has the appearance of blue text - think iOS) then onclick is a good choice. Especially for contexts where “open in new tab” makes no sense. I can’t see any valid reason for using a void link - worst of both worlds?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's such an extremely simple litmus test: if it breaks the back button of the browser, it's the wrong design. The closest thing to an exception being cases where one needs to be logged in to see a page, or when links are consciously invalidated for some other reason. And even then the website/webapp should still just signal this to the user without a bazillion redirects.
Virtually every site breaks the back button now. Even reddit will suddenly forget discussions I had closed, and where I was on the page, and then have to reload something, when I all I need it to do was take me back to the same state on the page that I had before.
This is just not my experience, at all. I'm extremely sensitive to this issue, and its just not something I see all that regularly any more.