Brad Knowles wrote:
One thing that really concerns me is excessive complexity in the user interface. As a MacOS X/Safari user, I've found so damn bloody many web sites that are totally hosed for me, regardless of whether I allow them to use JavaScript or not.
I can see that; I have that problem intermittently.
But the more complexity that is built into the user interface, the higher the likelihood is that something will accidentally happen somewhere to seriously break something for someone else.
This is really vague; I have no idea how, given that I have said that this thing will work without JavaScript on at all, this "don't do it because it might be complicated" heuristic is applicable.
In fact, I think it's quite likely that you will even be put into a situation where a bug in a given platform/browser combination causes you to completely re-work a lot of your carefully written code,
I'll put $10 down on the side of "I know what browsers do" and thus won't have to re-work my code to accommodate one broken browser.
In other words, I'd like to see that you really can walk in all the different likely shoe and surface combinations, before we let you draft us into supporting your plans to win the marathon -- especially if we're all going to be giving you all our scissors, razors, knives, swords, and other bladed instruments.
This strikes me as an argument from extremes; I am not advocating doing anything particularly complex.
I'd rather not, no. I have yet to see a single place on the Internet that actually does it right, and across all platform/browser combinations.
If you would give a concrete example maybe we could get past FUD.
More often than not, when typing in a phone number, I'll be unable to enter the last four digits because they simply set a length limitation on the field, and didn't bother to check for non-numeric characters.
Length limitation is something you can set in HTML. It's possible to make that mistake in JavaScript, too, but it's not JavaScript's fault.
I'd rather not, no. Again, every single website I've ever seen that tries to show me exactly what my comment is going to look like ends up not working very well.
Have you used http://wiki.list.org/ ? Is it "flat out broken" or "slow and distracting"? I find it has a few bugs, but mostly it works well.
reordering a list without a zillion little checkboxes/number boxes and ambiguous behaviour if the same number is entered twice?
Not really, no. When I've seen that done in the past, it was almost always dead-dog slow and far more of an annoyance than any help that it could possibly have been.
Here's a specific example that works well for me: Does the drag/drop of boxes on the customized google home page not work for you? You don't have to sign in to try it, and it allows drag/drop reordering for me in Safari just fine, and way more intuitively than resubmitting the page after clicking on buttons.
Like that damn bloody stupid "find as you type" crap. I've learned a few things about torture over the years.
I'm sorry that this has been so unpleasant for you. I find it helpful in several cases.
What do you do when you have a data structure not well suited to tabular display or a list/tree? Just give the user fragments of the content?
I'm not sure that I've got any answers for you, with regards to how you should resolve this issue.
So you have no constructive feedback, nor a sufficiently detailed critique that I can even address your concerns. I'm not sure what you would have me do with your advice, beyond my already existing commitment to make the page work without JavaScript.
it's not physically possible to know, a priori, everything that any user might ever want to do under any and all possible circumstances.
If this were the criteria, no user interface would ever get built.
I have already articulated a strategy that covers all browsers currently released with a measurable market share.
- IE 5+, Mozilla (any), Safari from 1.0+ and any other KHTML browsers, JAWS 6+, Opera 6+, Lynx, Links. All in any combination of Images/CSS/JavaScript off/on.
I look forward to your feedback when I have something that you can try; perhaps that will help us talk about specific issues.
~ethan fremen