licentious radio

Thursday, February 13, 2003
[11:17:51 AM]

What to click. I watch movies on DVD sometimes. I have this 19-inch monitor. The clickable areas are *tiny*. They're hard to find. Just make stuff clickable, darn it.

With stylesheets and a bit of automation, we can do better than we've done so far. Say your homepage has headlines and one or two paragraph summaries or leads. The headline should be clickable, sure.

But why not the text of the paragraphs?

First, you don't want the text underlined, and you don't want the same *loud* hover indication. We can do that with stylesheets.

Second, you don't want non-CSS browsers to have the whole paragraph underlined (because it's so much harder to read underlined text). So you have to be able to send *different* html to CSS and non-CSS browsers. You have to automate, and you have to have some server-side browser-sniffing. (Or easy client-side opt-in.)

Third, you can't nest links. If the paragraph contains a link itself, that would require special handling. But *that's* OK, since you already have to automate. Just end the paragraph link before the link in the text, and start another link after. The specific link in the text should be obvious when you hover, so customers know that they're getting the right link when they click.

As ol' Jakob says, most customers spend most of their time at other sites, so not everyone will make use of a feature like this. Some people may even get confused by it, though they're more likely to wonder why other websites don't work like this, rather than why your's does. But some people will be helped, and that's what we're here for, right?