Re: SEUL: More questions and a few answers

[Ian Bicking <bickiia@earlham.edu>]

My own opinions, at least, nothing authoritative...

On Sun, Dec 05, 1999 at 09:06:37PM -0800, anand_r_vaidya wrote:
> Is it not a good idea to use frames? (On my intranet web server, I 
> use them heavily). I feel the only downside is creating "bookmarks" 
> to pages deep inside the site.

I feel they break a lot of the metaphors which people normally rely
upon when browsing.  Not only don't bookmarks work, but back/forward
doesn't work right (when you go back multiple pages), printing often
doesn't work (you have to have the right frame in focus -- people
usually don't understand focus at all), keyboard commands don't work
right (focus again), it uses up space, and if you're not careful 
frames can look really ugly and chop things off.

Well, you can tell what my opinion is :)  Honestly, I find it 
somewhat arrogant when people use frames (no offense intended).  It
implies that the user is supposed to navigate the site in the way
the author intended, entering in the locations the author intended,
and using the links the author intended.  The flexibility of the
web -- powerful in its simplicity -- is lost in the complications.

> Personally, I prefer blue/white combination for color scheme with 
> black text (turning yellow upon highlighting). I like M$ website 
> design (though I do not like their 'innovative' business methods)

Having just looked at the MS website, it looks fine with the 
exception of the font sizes, which are so often a problem on
commercial sites which don't respect diversity...

I like the blue they use on the navigation bar at the top.  But I
like light blue in general...

> Is it a must for us to consider monochrome / non-graphical browser users?

I haven't seen many cases when it's not otherwise a good design
choice to consider such browsers.  It doesn't have to look pretty --
it usually never will -- but there's no reason it shouldn't be
usable.

> How about providing a printer-friendly page?

I think these can be quite nice and would fit nicely into a more
general document framework (if we had such a thing...)

> Would we like to have JavaScripts? Or are we limiting to HTML only?

I wouldn't see any reason not to use JavaScript as long as it
degrades well (i.e., a non-JavaScript browser wouldn't know it
was missing anything).


-- 
Ian Bicking         / 4869 N. Talman Ave. Apt. G, Chicago, IL 60625
bickiia@earlham.edu / http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~bickiia