Re: simple & understandable

At 02:41 PM 6/24/1999 , Anne Pemberton wrote:
>>* Access to individual image links are better supported in every
>>  browser than access to imagemaps

>Access on the image map isn't necessary for all users. The links are
>presented on the rest of the page loaded with glorious text. 

Yes it is, though.  Because they don't know whether or not
they're missing something.

>>* Ease of maintenance 
>Well, I'm the cat who does the maintenance on the web site, [...]

...today, you mean.  :)  Things change, and web designs really
need to be organic and scalable.

>Do you mean that there should be a border around each graphic? That's easy
>to do ... I hadn't done it because it would make the graphics look heavier
>on the page.

I'm saying that by default graphics have borders around them that
are blue or purple if they are used as links.  Getting rid of those
borders (as imagemaps do) kills useful functionality.

>I still have much to learn about style sheets, so I'm not clear what
>advantage they have.

Read up on them!  They are very important and can improve accessibility
a lot.  There's some information linked from:

     http://aware.hwg.org/tips/

>If I take out the lines, the design changes, and the icons are not coming
>from the open hand.

Is this necessary, though?  As it is now, I'm not sure that it is
adequately conveyed that the icons are coming _from_ the open hand,
just that they _link to it_.  If you think it's an _important_ design
consideration (which I'm not personally convinced that it is), then
you may want to use arrows or something besides just a set of
straight lines.  Perhaps curved freehand lines, sorta like comic book
style "speed lines"?

[By the way, an excellent book for web designers is Understanding
 Comics, by Scott McCloud.  Serious!  Even Jakob recommends it.]

>It's not Front Page ... the extraneous code is done when Publisher converts
>it to html (Publisher doesn't let you edit the html like Front Page does).
>When I understand what the code does, and know I don't want it, I'll take
>it out. How much loading time is saved? in seconds? milliseconds? 

Depends on the user's link speed -- for me, it's milliseconds
(here); for users with slower computers and slower connections,
there may be sizable download time (maybe half a second extra)
and some extra processing time as well.

>>* The links in your imagemap are repeated as text header links 
>>  lower in the page, which is good.  I would place a copy of the
>>  picture next to each textual link,

>I'd thought of doing that, but not sure if it was helpful and/or would be
>another stumbling block for non-graphical users.

Why a stumbling block?


--
Kynn Bartlett                                    mailto:kynn@hwg.org
President, HTML Writers Guild                    http://www.hwg.org/
AWARE Center Director                          http://aware.hwg.org/

Received on Thursday, 24 June 1999 19:58:07 UTC