Re: Email question

At 12:09 PM 8/9/2002 -0600, you wrote:
>Totally in violation of the Human Interface Guidelines.
>
>Please is there not enough stuff popping up in our faces these days.

Wouldn't the act of clicking on an email link open the users mailer of 
choice? I fail to see how adding some text to an already opened window 
aggravates the issue... if your advocating *not* opening an email client at 
all you have certainly picked a difficult row to hoe.

>If the name HIG does not bring up any thoughts look at modern TV, VCRs and 
>other consumer goods and look how much easier they are to set up compared 
>to old.  The HIG covers human machine interaction and was published in 
>1988.  The HIG recommends strongly that items do not spring up in a users 
>face without complete foreknowledge.

I imagine that clicking on a mailto: link would provide some sort of 
foreknowledge, the other option would be to force the user to fill out a 
form and in that case the subsequent redirect would be a new item. Six of 
one, half dozen of the other.

I'm also curious about your HIG reference. A cursory Goggle search turns up 
a Java HIG, a Mac HIG, a GNOME HIG, and a slew of others. Which one are you 
referring to and why is it any more definitive than another?

I'm also unclear on the relevance of a pre WWW (CERN and Berners-Lee didn't 
cook it up until 1991) guideline 15 years later. While possibly applicable 
to GUI's most of todays users are fully conversant with a simple mailto, 
we're not talking anything new or earth shattering here.

I would be far more concerned about guidelines and standards relevant to 
the web than esoteric programmatic issues.

-----------------------------------------
Al Sessions
al(at)oldforgefd.org
http://www.fultonchaindesign.com/mt (personal weblog)

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