"As you may see, when they reach the bottom of the screen the text of the link disappears behind the so called status bar. This is just one example of the broken state of default focus behaviour. There are many more. It shows that keyboard navigation is neglected by the people who build browsers as well."
This originated as part of a wider initiative to give us a "cleaner" browsing experience (part of the whole make-everything-flat-and-hide-it-behind-a-hamburger-menu) with less wasted space, by hiding the once always-present status bar (see http://toastytech.com/guis/ff15t.html ) and showing it only when needed. Kind of like GTK scroll bars today.
Like many other similar attempts, this fell flat on its face in the real world (for this and many other reasons), but the field of UI/UX design is still in a state where if you point out things like these, you're contemptuously told that this is how progress looks like and that consumers today want a functional look without extraneous widgets, and that it's a fringe case anyway. Punched cards are usually brought into discussion if you so much as utter the name "Netscape".
<<This enables Simon to browse the archive and use it for his pleasure and his research. Simon was amazed. While he had tried many times before, he had never found these three thematic entrances to the 2Doc archive.
When I showed this design to Yuri Westplat, a colleague of mine and very experienced UX designer, he exclaimed: "this is what websites looked like in the nineties! Where did we go wrong?!">>
Also from the same page a very interesting point that I have not given much thought:
> Screen readers
> I’ve always assumed that adding detailed structural semantics to an HTML document is a good idea. I started to doubt if this is such a good idea when I observed casual computer users who depend on a screen reader. All elements that have some relevant semantic value, like heading levels, navigation items, links and forms get this meaning attached to it, which is spoken out loud. So this page would’t simply start with the title spoken out, but it would sound like heading level one, The defaults suck. When a page consist of many elements, things can become very annoying.
> My impulsive reaction was to create websites without any structural semantics in them. Bram Duvigneau pointed out that, while this might indeed help some casual screen reader users, it would very much cripple the experience for experienced users.
I've thought about stripping away some HTML semantics to make screen reader navigation less "wordy." Navigation menus are often coded as unordered lists. I've considered not making them lists because I'll keep menu length manageable (no more than 7) and I know the screen reader will announce "link" plus the link text for every item; the separation between items should still be clear. But it might not be clear when they reached the end and it would be contrary to the norms users are familiar with; I wouldn't make this change without testing it with multiple real screen reader users.
"As you may see, when they reach the bottom of the screen the text of the link disappears behind the so called status bar. This is just one example of the broken state of default focus behaviour. There are many more. It shows that keyboard navigation is neglected by the people who build browsers as well."
This originated as part of a wider initiative to give us a "cleaner" browsing experience (part of the whole make-everything-flat-and-hide-it-behind-a-hamburger-menu) with less wasted space, by hiding the once always-present status bar (see http://toastytech.com/guis/ff15t.html ) and showing it only when needed. Kind of like GTK scroll bars today.
Like many other similar attempts, this fell flat on its face in the real world (for this and many other reasons), but the field of UI/UX design is still in a state where if you point out things like these, you're contemptuously told that this is how progress looks like and that consumers today want a functional look without extraneous widgets, and that it's a fringe case anyway. Punched cards are usually brought into discussion if you so much as utter the name "Netscape".
Edit: Reading this series makes me feel vindicated, I think?:-). See this: https://exclusive-design.vasilis.nl/design-like-its-1999/ .
<<This enables Simon to browse the archive and use it for his pleasure and his research. Simon was amazed. While he had tried many times before, he had never found these three thematic entrances to the 2Doc archive.
When I showed this design to Yuri Westplat, a colleague of mine and very experienced UX designer, he exclaimed: "this is what websites looked like in the nineties! Where did we go wrong?!">>