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Re: Appropriate to use textarea to display text?

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Apr 30, 2005 3:54PM

On Sat, 30 Apr 2005, Patrick H. Lauke wrote:


>> It's not necessarily those evil lawyers, but legislation itself that
>> requires that users be made aware of terms and conditions before being
>> able to enter into a formal contract...


Quite often there's really no format contract, just some contract-like
text that lawyers use to entertain themselves and make themselves look
necessary.

Assuming there is a real contract, then the stamp-size windows work
_against_ fulfilling the principle you mention. Anyone who starts from
what the users need writes such simple terms that they can be included
into the page itself as normal content or uses a link to a page that
presents and explains the terms.

The terms and conditions are quite often incomprehensible even to educated
people, should they try to understand them. Surely the situation is much
worse to people with cognitive disabilities.

-- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/