Look at that! Netscape is already cooperating with MS Free Friday! :-) First thing to try this Friday: Netscape 6.1 Beta 1.
Dave: What if every Friday were a Microsoft-free day for the Web? You can use MSIE any day but Friday. [Scripting News]
Brilliant idea. This will also help detect the remaining bugs in Mozilla or any webpage.
Dave: A webmaster of a large site asks how will they add the opt-out code for Smart Tags in their pages, and who will pay for it. He's pretty sure his management won't. Will Microsoft? (BTW, what are the opt-out tags? I want to start planning for this asap.) [Scripting News]
There is supposed to be a <meta> tag for this. But nobody seems to know what values. But I wouldn't worry, it seems that the Smart Tags will be turned off by default. Also you can never completely prevent it, because of the "Always have Web pages display available smart tags" option.
Thinking more about the differences between text in a website and text in a menu, I realized that I usually don't read menus at all. When looking for an item in a menu, I subconsciously make an image of the item in my mind, and try to match it with the items in a menu. Only when I can't find it, I switch to reading mode, which is a lot slower. This may also explain why people can completely overlook an item in a menu: the item probably doesn't match their own expected image of that item.
I was discussing font sizes with Marco, he's a graphics designer. We wondered why the default Windows font size seems too small for websites. Conclusion: when reading websites, you're reading complete sentences, and it's annoying when you can't read at full speed. But reading menus and buttons goes word by word anyway, so a smaller font doesn't matter that much.
Wednesday, June 13, 2001
