Friday, October 07, 2005
Alright, back on topic with the Macintosh
Yeah, so I'm not the typical user. But when I'm surfing the web, I wouldn't even so much as think of clicking on an external link without first taking a peek at where it leads to. It's not that I'm afraid of bad things happening, I just don't like to have my time wasted by being taken to sites I have no interest in. Some Safari users don't even seen to be aware that this is possible, but a quick trip to View -> Show Status Bar will give you the magical little strip of gray across the bottom of the browser that will tell you, with a simple mouse-over, where a link points to.
So here's my question: why don't we have this feature in Mail? In an email, all links are external links, rarely do you have sufficient context to tell you exactly where you're going to be taken, and in this case there is the potential to be taken to places less than safe. Seems it would be easy enough to run the same gray bar (er white, in the case of Mail) across the bottom that tells you where a link is going to take you. It's too much of a pain to copy and paste the link into Safari's browser bar just to see what it is.
On another note, the Safari Status Bar also tells you whether the link is going to open in the same window or pop in a new one. Which is nice, but it's too bad the creators of the HTML spec couldn't have foreseen the advent of tabbed browsing. When I'm halfway through reading a (good) article, the last thing I want to do is abandon the thing before I'm done just so I can go and visit the clever in-text link that the author has planted. But having the link pop open in a new window is so 1999. Sure, holding down the Apple key while clicking the link will force it to open in a new tab (provided you have your Safari prefs set correctly), but that gets old.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not dinging Safari for this, as it's certainly not the fault of anyone within Apple. In fact it's no one's fault, really. We're just going to have to wait for HTML 5.0 specification (or whatever it is) to surface, but it had better include a tag for popping a link into a new tab. Of course, with Windows Internet Explorer users still back in 1999, the tag is going to need to default a more traditional behavior for browsers that don't support tabbed browsing. Here's a hint, in case you haven't already figured it out: if you Mac users want your browsing experience on Safari to continue to move forward, encourage all your Windows-using friends to switch to something other than IE.
Alright, that's enough for being on-topic for today, I just wanted to get a feel for what that being on-topic like, as it's been awhile.
Yeah, so I'm not the typical user. But when I'm surfing the web, I wouldn't even so much as think of clicking on an external link without first taking a peek at where it leads to. It's not that I'm afraid of bad things happening, I just don't like to have my time wasted by being taken to sites I have no interest in. Some Safari users don't even seen to be aware that this is possible, but a quick trip to View -> Show Status Bar will give you the magical little strip of gray across the bottom of the browser that will tell you, with a simple mouse-over, where a link points to.
So here's my question: why don't we have this feature in Mail? In an email, all links are external links, rarely do you have sufficient context to tell you exactly where you're going to be taken, and in this case there is the potential to be taken to places less than safe. Seems it would be easy enough to run the same gray bar (er white, in the case of Mail) across the bottom that tells you where a link is going to take you. It's too much of a pain to copy and paste the link into Safari's browser bar just to see what it is.
On another note, the Safari Status Bar also tells you whether the link is going to open in the same window or pop in a new one. Which is nice, but it's too bad the creators of the HTML spec couldn't have foreseen the advent of tabbed browsing. When I'm halfway through reading a (good) article, the last thing I want to do is abandon the thing before I'm done just so I can go and visit the clever in-text link that the author has planted. But having the link pop open in a new window is so 1999. Sure, holding down the Apple key while clicking the link will force it to open in a new tab (provided you have your Safari prefs set correctly), but that gets old.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not dinging Safari for this, as it's certainly not the fault of anyone within Apple. In fact it's no one's fault, really. We're just going to have to wait for HTML 5.0 specification (or whatever it is) to surface, but it had better include a tag for popping a link into a new tab. Of course, with Windows Internet Explorer users still back in 1999, the tag is going to need to default a more traditional behavior for browsers that don't support tabbed browsing. Here's a hint, in case you haven't already figured it out: if you Mac users want your browsing experience on Safari to continue to move forward, encourage all your Windows-using friends to switch to something other than IE.
Alright, that's enough for being on-topic for today, I just wanted to get a feel for what that being on-topic like, as it's been awhile.
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