On Wed, 2005-02-09 at 18:36 +0900, D_C wrote:
Have you ever asked what the users think about such sites?
The system should give flexibility to the designer as much as the user.
No, it shouldn't. In matters of user interface policy, the system should tie the designer's hands as much as possible, so that users have some chance of predicting, and controlling, what happens next on their computers.
He probably knows more about his site's req's than you do.
The web is filled with poor user interfaces by designers who thought they knew better than their users. Unless there is a really, really good reason to do otherwise, common user interface actions like "clicking on a hyperlink" ought to offer to me, an end-user, the usual range of choices and behaviours. That way, *I* get to decide to open it in the same window, another window, a tab, save it to a file, my scrapbook, or whatever.
Unless this choice by me fundamentally interferes with the purpose of the web site, it is arrogant presumption by the web designer to deny it to me.
if the designer chooses to make an art-piece and ignore the users, he should be able to.
What would an 'art-piece wiki' even mean? Something that encourages user input and participation while simultaneously ignoring it? Eh?
For example this guy might be doing a bank intranet site where he needs to make really clear what is an external resource.
He might be, but the question he asked suggests that it's just a personal preference being embedded into a design:
My convention for sites I do is to make links that go off-site open a new window. Is there a simple way to do this? If not a simple way,
Apparently, one designer has decided that how he likes to do things is how everyone must do them; this is poor web design, and I would be disappointed if mediawiki encouraged it.
The implication here is that mediawiki makes it difficult for a designer to pre-determine link functionality.
Mediawiki ought to make it hard to shove user interface policy changes down users' throats; this is A Good Thing, especially if it forces web designers to think more about how their decisions can frustrate and confuse their users.