Re: Seeking guidance...

The problem for users who cannot see that a popup has opened, or who have
difficulty understanding exactly what is going on, is that in the popup
window they are disoriented - the usual trick of using the back button
doesn't work properly (Back is the second biggest function on the web, after
following links in the first place).

There are multiple ways of dealing with it - a browser that kept a history
across different window (and most browsing history is a tree, which current
browsers tend to just lop all the time - Lynx probably has the best history
mechanisms available) could deal with the problem as effectively as not suing
popupsin the first place.

cheers

Charles McCN

On Thu, 6 Apr 2000, Christopher Atkinson wrote:

  Thank you for the clear statement of what is wrong with popup windows. Would
  I be correct if I concluded that the corollary of your statement is that
  when the user *wants* to change focus, popups are okay?
  
  As an example, I have an <A> link with the text "Site Contents". OnClick or
  onKeyPress it opens a popup window containing a list of links to pages in my
  site. Focus passes to the popup (which should not annoy the user, since site
  contents is what he or she wants). OnClick or onKeyPress, the main window's
  "location.href" is changed to the selected link, focus shifts to the main
  window and the popup closes down. Again, the user should not be annoyed,
  since navigating to the selected page is what he or she wants.
  
  Or are all popups irremediably nasty, and I am just deluding myself because
  I want to play with JavaScript?
  
  Regards,
  

--
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053
Postal: GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001,  Australia

Received on Friday, 7 April 2000 02:11:27 UTC