[thelist] Site check - reprocessed.org

[Matt Patterson]

On 21/11/01 at 3:02 pm, allie at pajunas.com (Allie Micka) wrote:

> Personally, I found it very irritating.  I have virtually NO
> short-term memory, and found it frustrating when I clicked twice to
> get to a section, found several items interesting, followed one of the
> links and then was faced with the prospect of having to retrace my
> steps to get back to the other interesting links.  I found it
> distracting from the goal of reading your site's information.

This seems to be the consensus, so I'll look into implementing the
cookie thing ASAP. Some other points related to the way that
leaving/re-entering and other clicking about can make it hard to make
what you think should happen happen have been duly noted and I'm going
to take a shot at solving those problems. So, thanks again for your
input.

> I'm not trying to start some kind of holy war and I am sure this topic
> has been addressed frequently on the list; but what is the point of
> developing a site that very few people can enjoy?  I did a quick check
> of some of the more high volume sites I run, and found that about 5%
> use ie 6 and there were NO visits from Mozilla or Netscape 6.

The point is that I'm trying to show what could be, not what is. It's an
idealised case, which is why I have an ideological disclaimer on the
front page... This isn't a commercial site, it's a personal site. In one
sense I don't have to worry about my 'audience' because I'm not selling
anything. That may come across as sounding callous, but it isn't. I'm
trying to do something that is, in some sense, ideologically pure. I'm
not holding it up as an example to copy _right now_, it's not a
statement about the state of design. It's a statement about maybe how
things could be, and the kinds of issues it's possible to address when
you consider these things.

> I don't want this to come off as feisty or rude.  There's just way too
> much bad air in the internet for that. 

You haven't. I like being asked to explain myself.

> What I said about the responsiveness and coolness before still stands.
> I also think that your breadcrumbs on the bottom of the page are
> helpful to this process, and maybe a lot of trouble can be averted by
> simply moving them to the top.

Like I said before, in IE 5.1/Mac, Opera, Netscape 6.1+ and Mozilla
0.8.1+ you'll have a very different experience. The breadcrumbs stay at
the top, the typographic detail level is much higher, and there are many
other subtle changes which are simply impossible to achieve using clean
markup and CSS 1. Even so, if you were to look at the site in Lynx you'd
find that you could get around, that things were what they appeared to
be and that nothing was in the wrong order or hidden from you. It sounds
horrid when it seems like I'm saying 'I don't care about your
experience', but what I'm trying to say is 'look at what you can do, and
look how easy it can be.' Having said all that, there are some changes I
could make which would allow IE PC users to get breadcrumbs at the top
and bottom, but I'll need to brush up on Tantek's box model hack. On the
other hand, you might find it worth your while to check it out in
Mozilla or Netscape 6, but then of course you might not. I hope that you
would find that it was worth it.

Thanks again

Matt


-- 
   Matt Patterson | Typographer
   <matt at reprocessed.org> | http://reprocessed.org/