E-ditorial

The Off-Switch

Hello and welcome to the first Regina Felina E-ditorial. The E-, by the way, is similar to the e- in e-mail.

The first topic is simple enough. In the constantly evolving world of the World Wide Web many companies such as Netscape and Microsoft offer constantly updated browsers with new and innovative features. Some of these features are extremely useful, such as <TABLES>. Others, such as <BLINK>, are merely annoying.

However, if you are designing or helping to design a new browser I do have one request. Allow your users to turn this wonderful and innovative new feature off.

Let's look at frames. Personally, I like frames. I believe that displaying two or more different pages of information at the same time is an important part of true hypermedia.

On the other hand, many people do not like frames. They believe it takes up too much screen room. They dislike the navigating difficulties. Or they've seen too many sites use frames poorly, just because it's new and therefore "kewl". That's fine. They are welcome to their opinion.

The problem is this: Although I can easily set up a <NOFRAMES> version for older browsers, it is much more difficult for me to set up a version accommodating those users who have frames but do not want them

I know that using target=_top eliminates the frame itself. The problem comes when I want a link from one frame to a target in another, Netscape insists on opening a new browser for this link. This is not what I want.

Or what about <font color>. <font color> allows me to change the color of individual letters on a page. Kewl, right? Now, let's take a man who is colorblind, and he wants to read my page. He sets the background color and the text color to something he can read. However, he cannot turn off the individual font colors. Not in most browsers currently available, anyway. So much of the site is indecipherable to him, unless he views source.

Note that with poor <font color> choices a site can be indecipherable to everyone. And we can't turn it off.

I believe that many people who dislike these innovations actually dislike being forced to use them. If the browser designers simply allow us turn off the unwelcome features as easily as most of us can turn off the image loader we net-surfers will be grateful. And we page-designers extremely so.

That's my opinion. What's yours?

This page and its contents Copyright © 2000 David L. Lerner and 2100 Enterprises. All rights reserved. Contact me at dell2100@prodigy.net with your questions and comments.