Month: May 2003

<rant>I hate the magic wand link effect that became popular after IE introduced hover. Web designers took to making links invisible unless you waved your magic wand over them. Not only did this make links difficult to find, but startled users with the unexpected appearance of color or underlines. This was especially frustrating to those who had link underlining turned off and liked it off.

Now Mozilla users get to suffer through it again and worse than before. In “The Search for the Missing Link” Stuart Robertson takes the idea to a whole new level and describes how to make whole paragraphs blink for your magic wand. The sad thing is he’s trying to be helpful to users. He writes:

“With thoughtful use of colour and typography, links can be made less of a visual disruption, creating pages that are more aesthetically pleasing and text that is easier to read.

“However, if the style of a page’s links is too close to that of the text on the rest of the page, it can be difficult for users to see the links at all. In particular, users who have poor eyesight or are colour blind might have trouble finding the links on an otherwise well designed page.”

Underlining is extremely jarring from a typographic standpoint, so I understand the desire to eliminate it. Still, the web is all about links and for many users, unfortunately, underlining is the indication of a link. Intentionally making links “subtle and unobtrusive” means that many users won’t notice them at all, even with the hover effect, because they won’t think to try it.

I’ve already noticed a few in the Mozilla community—Asa, for one—playing with this effect in weblogs. If any style of writing is about links, it’s blogs. I don’t see a good reason to make links almost invisible. While it might make the text more readable, it makes it less usable. Linuxart jumps all the way to hiding content—the time of a post and the link to add comments—unless you mouse over the text. This prevents keyboard use because the content isn’t even there. So much for this helping accessiblity.

For quite a while now I’ve been thinking about how much more usable the web would be if there were consistent link colors and styles. I’ve thought about creating a user stylesheet that forces all non-visited links to blue. I can’t quite bring myself to do it because every once in a while I come across a beautifully designed site that uses uncommon colors, but is still quite usable. They’re rare, but I don’t want to miss them. Perhaps I need to create a Mozilla “manager” for always using my link colors and styles on specified sites.</rant>

I feel somewhat better now.

…because I keep finding more and more interesting open source projects that are using it.

I’ve been fascinated by the Chandler Personal Information Manager (PIM) being developed by the Open Source Applications Foundation and have been following its progress since I first heard about it in this post on Mitch Kapor’s weblog. We all want a better email program. Chandler is working to make one that lets you manage and organize messages (and other data) the way you want to. It has been said that it will have the spirit of Lotus Agenda, but will use a graphical and web-like interface.

I also found the Pyzzle game development engine, which allows you to create Myst- and Riven-like slideshow games. It supposedly also has support for objects, embedded movies, text overlays like the books, and custom pointers. Looks like fun.

I guess I better get started learning Python.

I was amused and enthused to accidentally find that there’s a whole car hacker culture on the web devoted to making Knight Industries Two Thousand (KITT) car replicas. Check out the Knight Replicas web site for building tips, discussion forums, links to parts suppliers, and information about the Knight Rider Television show. Of the parts suppliers, Mark’s Custom Kits was by far the most interesting—despite the terrible web design—and seemed to have the best quality parts. I was fascinated by their description of restoring a car from the tv show. The Convertible Project also looks fun—what a beautiful car!

Back in the Fabulous 80’s, KITT was the coolest car ever. KITT could talk, drive himself, and do killer stunts. The trademark glowing red “eye” and crazy instrument panel were totally awesome.

What blows me away is that many of KITT’s capabilities are a reality now or very close. They’re also more and more affordable. Voice recognition is old hat and GPS guidance systems are available now. Moble phones are available everywhere, and video call functions are coming along. Self-driving cars aren’t quite here, but there’s been much more research into it. How quickly science fiction becomes everyday fact.

I’ve had schematics for KITT for years now. Perhaps someday I’ll build him. I can dream anyway. It’s good to recapture some of that boyhood wonder.

It appears that Thursday is blog day this month. Ah, well. Blog as you can, not as you can’t, right?

At 13% for everyone, Russia’s flat tax sounds like a bargin.

The anticipated new design for the $20 bill has been revealed. It uses a subtle background color with blue, peach, and green. I’m not convinced that it will make it any more difficult to counterfeit. The design seems tolerable—at least it isn’t hideous monopoly colors—but I’ll refrain from additional comment until I see one in person.