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Re: Off-left vs. block/none oddity.

for

From: Christian Heilmann
Date: Feb 3, 2006 9:30AM

> > It would help to tell us what you mean by "hack"?
>
> Using standard markup and styles to produce something generally
> desirable in a way which was not specifically intended nor even
> implied in the specification.

Ah. Well, if we only went for what is in the specs, and how it is
meant to be, I could use inline onclicks and onkeypress together and
have an accessible site. However, that would mean that Firefox users
would get onkeypress functionality when they tab over the element,
which is not good. It would also mean that maintainability of the site
is very much under par. If I followed the 508 to the dot I could even
use javascript: links, as they "are supported by assistive
technology".

You are right though, hiding and showing things is a tempting but
dangerous toy. I said that some years ago and still mean it.
http://icant.co.uk/forreview/dynamicelements/

> > > Not necessarily. The structure here is fine, but the usability may not
> > > be ideal. Not strictly a hack, but an enhancement?
>
> > That is the idea. Ever since the first DHTML multi level dropdown menu
> > popped up on the web clients go apesh^H^H^H^H^H^H very excited about
> > this prospect.
>
> It's nice that Web clients want it. Web clients are often idiots,
> though, and whatever they go apeshit over may not be best practices,
> unless by "best practices" you mean "any hack to earn a buck."

Yes, much like the pointy haired boss in Dilbert, and who does the
business decisions and hires and fires people?

> > We all know it is not a need to offer that much
> > navigation on every page, but go and try to tell clients that.
> Why not tell them that?
> What do users think?
> What do your user studies show you, that you can then take to your clients?
> I mean, if the users are for it, that's one thing, but you're not
> arguing here that users are demanding menus or hidden text; you're
> arguing that clients want it. You would be arguing on stronger
> grounds if you had any sort of evidence to offer that this is good for
> the Web. (And by good for the Web, I mean good for the Web user.)

Yes, I know all that - but have you ever talked to an enterprise
level client or a client on a fixed price budget of which 50% were
already spent on a CMS that doesn't do its job? I am the UCD
evangelist here, and try to sell proper usability tests and iterations
on every project. So far I managed that with 3 of 14 clients as on the
first glance, it is an overhead cost without immediate results. Don't
get me wrong, I know it is not, I am just repeating what an
accountancy person told me.

We will go nowhere if we don't hold back from time to time, step down
from the soap box and get our hands dirty dealing with real
development life problems.

It is no use to ditch an interface because it is sub-optimal when it
comes out of the box of the