"Simetrical" Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote in message news:7c2a12e20707021637w3f10a167u85fa5ab624bd58fc@mail.gmail.com...
On 7/2/07, Phil Boswell
phil.boswell@gmail.com wrote:
Hence my suggestion to include the full textual message within the
"title"
attribute, which would appear as a tooltip.
Which will only appear if people actually hover over it, rather than anytime they happen to glance in that direction.
Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, unless someone provides good evidence that there's a concrete advantage to this, I'm going with my hunches and not personally implementing icons, although if specific wikis would like to they should be (and are) able to.
By your argument, icons are always bad!
Icons are necessarily at least _slightly_ less clear than text. It is not particularly intuitive that a picture of a house means go back to the starting page, but it has become recognised as such through consistent use between many browsers and websites. A standardised 'edit' button would do the same. If you read the discussion about UniversalWikiEditButton you would see the advice that for a period of adoption, the icon and text are displayed together so that users can become familiar with the link, and that once it has been widely adopted, the text could then be removed.
The problem with just text as a link, is that it can easily get lost amongst a page that is already predominantly text with links. Particularly if it gets moved to the left-hand side, so it is more embedded in the text.
Your 'hunch' goes against pretty much every UI study ever :-)
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)