Not muchness
A long day of work. Several hours of task-hopping, a three hour-long meeting, three hours of French. Oui, j'apprends le français. Yet somehow, a long day of nothingness, not-muchness. My heart flew and dwelt in other places; I visited England, France and Canada at the same time.
A girl was trying to survey people on the tram. "Why do you avoid politics?" she was asking. Thinking about the conversation with Barnaby much earlier in the day, I spoke a little about your average person's tendency to self-absorption. For the most of us, until our basic needs are threatened, it doesn't occur to us to care about much else.
In the process of sorting out bookmarks, I'd rediscovered a couple of zines which I'd never had time to read. "Designing Web Navigation: Traffic Light, Not Neon Light" talks about ... well, just that. Your good basic guidelines and so forth, but I don't necessarily agree that links have to be blue when unvisited and purple after they've been clicked upon. I believe most users are now a little smarter than that - the importance lies in being consistent, and having links which are obviously different from the rest of the text. There exists a small study on link affordances conducted in October 2000 - does anyone know of more recent (and wider) research?
Much to my joy, I found a working Figlet server, and a fairly handy page of Figlet fonts.
Posted by sniffles at March 14, 2002 12:24 AM