Re: Ah! Another HTML query!

> Nir:
> Its a problem if you are used to Netscape. I think that Explorer's
> (and Opera's) implementation is much better.
> The basic navigation unit is the page.

I will agree that the basic unit should be the page, but IE and Opera (I
assume... haven't used opera) still mark as visited all links on the page
even if you don't scroll down to see them, to me, is as confusing as not
marking them.  The "better" implementation is subjective.

> If you go to the named anchor by scrolling down the page, Netscape still
> will show it as unvisited. Users then get confused and think later they
> did not visit the segment.  Clearly Netscape's implementation is
> incosistent.

Is this inconsistant with the "basic unit is a page" idea or with what you
expect to find?  NS is consistant within itself, although it seems to
consistantly be what you do not expect.

>If user's history has to do with "anchors read", they have
> to change the link's color to visited even if you get there by scrolling.

What if you scroll past without reading it?  I believe IE, when it goes to
a named link at the bottom of the page, "scrolls" past the higher links to
get to the bottom one, which would efffectivly mark those above it as
visited.  That could be fixed though.... speaking of which, why should the
whole page load if you are only linking to that named part?  I didn't want
to read the other stuff, so why should I wait for it to load?

>
> In MSIE and Opera, user's history has to do with "pages visited"
> not with "anchors read". Their implementaion is consistent and
> not confusing.

Again, "not confusing" is very subjective.  I am not confused by NS's or
IE's implementation of the named anchors, although I agree that most new
users could be.  It would seem that perhaps these named anchors would make
more sense if they were marked as read only when they are directly linked
to, or when they are in the viewable "window" for more that a certain
amount of time (to eliminate the scroll by problem mentioned above).  I am
beginning to believe that the "basic unit" of HTML is not the page, but
the smallest single unit of content and therefor the entire page should
not be marked as visited if I only visit a named area in the middle.

>
> Regards,
> Nir Dagan
> http://www.econ.upf.es/%7Edagan/
>
>
				   O
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	Tom Scanlan		/\/
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Received on Wednesday, 22 July 1998 10:16:44 UTC