Soome servers, e.g. Apache, allow users to configure the appearance of directory listings--suppress file size or date, suppress or display "hidden" files, add one-line file descriptions, insert your own HTML head and foot for the listing. See http://home.olemiss.edu/~mudws/bin/ for a simple example. All this is achieved by configuring the server which generates the listings. Warren Steel ---------- .htaccess-file stuff: http://www.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_autoindex.html %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% God And Eve In The Garden Of Eden One day in the Garden of Eden, Eve calls out to God. "Lord, I have a problem!" "What's the problem, Eve?" "Lord, I know you created me and provided this beautiful garden and all of these wonderful animals and that hilarious comedic snake, but I'm just not happy." "Why is that, Eve?" came the reply from above. "Lord, I am lonely, and I'm sick to death of apples." "Well, Eve, in that case, I have a solution. I shall create a man for you." "What's a man, Lord?" "This man will be a flawed creature, with many bad traits. He'll lie, cheat, and be vain; all in all, he'll give you a hard time. But he'll be bigger, faster, and will like to hunt and kill things. He will look silly when he's aroused, but since you've been complaining, I'll create him in such a way that he will satisfy your physical needs. He will be witless and will revel in childish things like fighting and kicking a ball about. He won't be too smart, so he'll also need your advice to think properly." "Sounds great." says Eve, with an ironically raised eyebrow. What's the catch, Lord?" "Well ... you can have him on one condition." "What's that, Lord?" "As I said, he'll be proud, arrogant, and self-admiring ... So you'll have to let him believe that I made him first. Just remember, it's our little secret... "You know, woman to woman." %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% view-source:http://www.whatever.com %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% http://www.vortex-webdesign.com/help.htm %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% chamal wrote: > where can i find tutorials about html 5.0 on the internet Looks like we've got a server in an alternate reality leaking articles into our universe again. (You can tell it's from an alternate reality: it was an article posted from Altavista but had proper CRLF line ends.) Please use the Distribution header containing keyword for your universe to prevent such leakage again. It shouldn't be necessary, but there's obviously a leaky relay. Hopefully it should honor an explicit Distribution header where it failed to honor the implied header. greg@apple2.com %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% These aren't troll "lingo", goof, they're usenet/chat acronyms, used everywhere on usenet. All they are is shorthand for commonly used phrases. You can find a fairly comprehensive list of them at: http://members.aol.com/nigthomas/alphabet.html %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% On Tue, 2 May 2000, happy head wrote: > ** There is no standard to creativity. ** Even the most adventurous building has to consider the properties of its chosen building materials, and (if anyone's to actually enter it), to conform with fire and safety codes etc. The best artists all understood the properties of their chosen materials, whether oils or whatever, and capitalised on their strengths, and knew how to avoid falling foul of their shortcomings. That's one of the reasons they were great artists, and why their work is recognised as such. Alan J. Flavell --------------- happy head wrote: >Alan J. Flavell wrote: > >> The best artists all understood the properties of their chosen >> materials, whether oils or whatever, and capitalised on their >> strengths, and knew how to avoid falling foul of their shortcomings. >> That's one of the reasons they were great artists, and why their work >> is recognised as such. > >Hmmm. I would have to disagree. Throughout time many artists have >pushed the envelope of their medium, broken the standards and rewrote >them. > >What of M.C. Escher and his ability to distort the "rules" of >perspective to create beautiful works of art? What of Salvador Dali -- >did he follow the rules? > >It is one thing to understand the tools of your medium, but quite >another to exploit them to their fullest creative potential; to step >outside the confines of learned and embedded ideas. Are you kidding? Have you every studied the work and craft of either of these artists? Like Picasso and others, all of them were trained in exactly how to do things by the book. Picasso and Dali could paint an object better than you or I could photograph it. Escher was never that good in terms of realism, he had more of an engineer's mind for lines and patterns. Once they perfected and got bored with painting reality, then they kept that skill, and started working on specific methods meant to convey specific ideas and contexts to illustrate concepts and ideas that they thought about for months and years. Escher eventually did about one work a year. That's where his famous prints come from. Go to the Dali museum sometime down in Florida and get a tour and an explanation of what goes on in his work. Check out a book on Escher and the hows and whys of what he did what he did. You'll see that each broke the rules in defined and specific ways in order to trick the mind into seeing things that weren't there. The whole purpose of many of their works is to CONFUSE the brain and then give the viewer that "charge" as they sit there on the thin line between an automatic visual confusion and a mental understanding of the paradox. Do you really want your visitors to you site caught in such a conundrum where they are first overcome with confusion and wonder and then finally, after careful studying and contemplation, resolve the paradoxes and get the joy of solving the visual puzzle? I don't think so. Usually, it just leaves the person with confusion and a pissed off attitude that someone wanted to make their "Red, Yellow, Green" paradigm into a Jackson Pollack. Jon S. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% New Alta Vista ? http://www.raging.com/ Alternative to Deja: http://www.remarq.com/ Hot Bot also have a text only search interface (banner ad free so far) at http://hotbot.lycos.com/text/ %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% -- Artificial Intelligence: Making computers behave like they do in the movies %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% B.P. writes >I may end up reducing the number of links on my pages. >> Navigating through that lot took some time !! > >If that is your concern, why not make a special text only version for >Lynx users instead of degrading the site for all. Who said anything about degrading the site ? I was talking about redesigning for clarity. Lynx makes you concentrate on the basic content of the page, not on the frills. If I have too many links in Lynx, then I have too many links in any other browser. The difference is that with a graphical browser, I can place the links out of the way, whereas Lynx displays them in the order they appear in the HTML. I was using Lynx as a means to reassess how much information I place on a page. On some of the sites I have designed, I have been guilty of cramming a site guide into the margin of every page. This is not necessarily a good idea (occasionally is, but not often) and is shown dramatically when you look at the bare bones of the page in Lynx. -- Alan Silver %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% It seems that your current view of the WWW would have been rather narrow in the nineties, never mind the noughties. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Here is the best summary of usenet that I've found. Don't dismiss it because it's light-hearted, because it really is How Things Are. :) http://msnhomepages.talkcity.com/WindowsWay/soque/index.html Jet %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Subject: Re: When should we start supporting high bandwidth users Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 20:12:03 -0400 From: Arjun Ray Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html Tom Joyce wrote: | will the network as a whole be able to handle the higher throughputs | that will be caused if everyone were to start sticking streaming video | etc on every page and every user started trying to get at it? No. Unfortunately, this will never make the FAQ. Q: Can I have streaming media on the Internet? A: Sure, as long as the rest of Internet steps aside and lets you have it. The problem is *not* technological (as in "throw more bandwidth at the problem"). It's economic. There is no pricing of congestion, and so the "tragedy of the commons" is inevitable. http://dieoff.org/page95.htm Economists call it a negative externality. The infrastructure plays a role too. Telephone networks are circuit switched and so can guarantee bandwidth (actually, throughput) once a connection is established. The Internet, OTOH, is a packet-switched network with statistical multiplexing. It's connectionless, and so it's not even *designed* to support a concept of throughput. This, with generally fixed-price leasing from upstream providers, virtually guarantees the tragedy of the commons scenario. Alternatives, such as Vickrey auctions for pricing, are still a long ways from realistic deployment. http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/resources/infoecon/Pricing.html | The end user's connection while often the bottle neck in delivery it | is not always so. I remember pages crawling onto my screen when I was | using a 100 meg connection at uni. For that matter, the vast hordes swarming all over the 'Net today have no idea what the "rush hour" was like when the Shoemaker-Levy pictures were put online. Fools say something like that won't happen again. Realists know that it will. Again and again. ----------- Arjun Ray wrote: > > http://dieoff.org/page95.htm > > Economists call it a negative externality. The US market is now saturated with about 40% of Americans on-line (individuals, not families), figuring that 25% of Americans live in poverty and currently have other worries like food and shelter. Figure in that another 15% is too young, you have close to maximum possible penetration in the US. I would suppose Europe will be at similiar levels soon. I simply cannot see much further market saturation in the US until access devices break below the $250 price barrier and more into the $99 range. I would supsept europe will follow similiar patterns. If the bandwidth is available on the technical side, then price is the only inhibiting factor. Economic theory will dictate that prices will decrease as venders push for more market penetration > > http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/resources/infoecon/Pricing.html This is an interesting resource, will have to explore it a bit more. > For that matter, the vast hordes swarming all over the 'Net today have > no idea what the "rush hour" was like when the Shoemaker-Levy pictures > were put online. Try the 4-5 closing NYSE market rush in the US, everything slows to a crawl. One thing I fear is that cacheing at highbandwidth providers will allow high volume sites to have quicker access than low volume sites further placing barriers in front of small business. B.P. ---------------- In , Tom Joyce wrote: This is a second effort, hopefully more focused on the issue raised:-) | will the network as a whole be able to handle the higher throughputs No, because the network as a whole has no support for the concept of throughput. The hordes of net.idiots will refuse to grasp this fact, but it's worth repeating: the Internet does *not* support throughput, indeed *by design*. On the Internet, throughput is a statistical artefact only. Packets are moved from point to point on a strictly first come first served basis. There is no notion of prioritizing packets that "belong" to "already established connections" (as there is in connection-based infrastructures such as X.25 or telephony), because the infrastructure doesn't even *try* to maintain connections. If a packet hits a choke point, the router simply drops it into a black hole. No forwarding, no retries, no notification sent back, nothing. It's up to the end points to take care of things like retransmissions, acknowledgments, and sequencing. This is why TCP has so much overhead to create a "virtual circuit" on top of the connectionless infrastructure of IP. It's also the reason for the characteristic difference in response to congestion, between circuit-switched networks (like the telephones) and packet-switched networks (like the Internet). With telephones, peak load leads to connections not being established at all. Established connections aren't affected: their "bandwidth" is already reserved. Teenagers and Trappists impose the same load on the system while the connection is open. That's why the new line doesn't get through. On the Internet, OTOH, everyone's packets have an equal chance of being lost, because the bandwidth is being shared. So, on a statistical basis, congestion impacts the "throughput" of every data transfer in progress. There are no favorites or privileged ones. In fact, much of the internal complexity of TCP is only for congestion avoidance: features such as slow start (packets graduate up to "window size"), exponential back off (retransmissions are at slower and slower rates), LFP detection ("Long Fat Pipes" or "elephants" impose severe retransmission overhead), etc. This is a reflection of the fact that congestion affects everyone across the board, not just the newcomers as in telephony. And because TCP is so paranoically conservative about this *systemic* consequence, a single transient choke event *will* slow things down for everyone. That's right, everyone. Sorry, no favorites. Obviously, any service that requires a sustained rate of data transfer can't be supported except by accident or good luck. That is, you can have your throughput only if others don't get in your way. The point is that others *will* get in your way, because congestion is chronic. This is not technology, this is economics. It's inherent in any shared medium, a "commons", to be systemically oversubscribed. Unfortunately, there are still more than enough fools failing to draw the obvious conclusions from this. | While users might have a higher theoretical maximum download rate, | network bandwidth is still a finite resource Precisely. A finite *shared* resource. No favorites, no privileges, no reservations. The important fact is not the size but the finitude. "More than enough bandwidth for everybody" is a favorite pipedream of the net.moron brigades. Packaging the fantasy in new feelgoods like "high bandwidth users" is no excuse to shovel more and more mindless fluff onto the wire, but being net.morons, they'll persist. Just don't be taken in. Arjun Ray %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Alan Silver (alan-silver@prestwich-smile-gemach.freeserve.furryferret.co.uk) wrote: : Probably. If you look around, you will find that most newspapers, : magazines, TV programs, etc etc also have a fairly predictable look and : feel. If you are aiming for a big market, you need something that is : comfortable for the user/viewer. Most people don't like to be : challenged. That's why soap operas are so popular. They don't take any : brain power at all and don't challenge you in any way. You've inadvertently touched on one of the biggest differences between the Web and TV. The reason "unchallenging" TV programs are so popular is *not* that people "lack brain power" or "don't like to be challenged," it's that people usually overlap TV watching with other activities and therefore can't devote their full attention to it. The stereotypical soap-opera viewer (i.e. the person the producers have in mind when they develop the show) is a housewife who has the soap on while she's cleaning, cooking, and feeding the baby. Therefore, the program has to be designed so that you can still follow it even if you've missed unpredictable chunks of it, and that rules out all but the most shallow programming. Deeper material will appeal only to those who can set aside enough time to do nothing but watch it. That's a smaller percentage of the audience, but it definitely exists. People don't, however, "surf in the background" the way they watch TV in the background, and with even the most dynamic Web site the content isn't so transitory that you need to worry about people missing chunks of it because of distractions. If a Web site has *any* of a viewer's attention, it has *all* of it, *unless* that site is in the process of loading and taking way to long to do so. If you get up to go to the john while viewing a Web page, everything's still there when you get back, unlike a TV show where you've missed part of the action. Unlike a TV program, a Web page doesn't have to be compelling even when viewed in disconnected snippets, because there's nothing that corresponds to viewing it in disconnected snippets. A Web site doesn't have to be designed to appeal to people who are paying only partial attention to it, and in fact *shouldn't* be designed that way, because such a design is quite annoying to people who *are* paying full attention. Eric Bohlman ----------- In article <8gvnjl$8o0$1@slb6.atl.mindspring.net>, Eric Bohlman writes >Alan Silver (alan-silver@prestwich-smile-gemach.freeserve.furryferret.co.uk) >wrote: >: Probably. If you look around, you will find that most newspapers, >: magazines, TV programs, etc etc also have a fairly predictable look and >: feel. If you are aiming for a big market, you need something that is >: comfortable for the user/viewer. Most people don't like to be >: challenged. That's why soap operas are so popular. They don't take any >: brain power at all and don't challenge you in any way. > >You've inadvertently touched on one of the biggest differences between the >Web and TV. The reason "unchallenging" TV programs are so popular is >*not* that people "lack brain power" or "don't like to be challenged," I never said anything about brain power, just about how much people like to exercise that power. >it's that people usually overlap TV watching with other activities and >therefore can't devote their full attention to it. The stereotypical >soap-opera viewer (i.e. the person the producers have in mind when they >develop the show) is a housewife who has the soap on while she's cleaning, >cooking, and feeding the baby. Therefore, the program has to be designed >so that you can still follow it even if you've missed unpredictable chunks >of it, and that rules out all but the most shallow programming. Deeper >material will appeal only to those who can set aside enough time to do >nothing but watch it. That's a smaller percentage of the audience, but it >definitely exists. Do you have any statistics do back up this claim ? I was only speaking from personal experience (ie watching others watching TV. I don't watch it myself), but I would be surprised if you are right. From what I've seen/heard, the majority are slaves to the soap operas. I've seen heated discussions of the previous evening's episodes eat up a whole morning in an office. These people were not doing something else at the time, they were in there living it out with the characters. >People don't, however, "surf in the background" the way they watch TV in >the background, and with even the most dynamic Web site the content isn't >so transitory that you need to worry about people missing chunks of it >because of distractions. If a Web site has *any* of a viewer's attention, >it has *all* of it, *unless* that site is in the process of loading and >taking way to long to do so. Again, speaking from experience I would challenge this assumption. I rarely give any one web site my full attention. I usually have several browser windows open at once and flit between sites. Even people who only have one site are likely to jump quickly from one site to another. The biggest challenge facing web designers (specifically those involved in e-commerce) is to remember that just because someone has come to your site does *not* mean that you have any claim to their attention. It's way easier to leave a site than leave a shop. > If you get up to go to the john while >viewing a Web page, everything's still there when you get back, unlike a >TV show where you've missed part of the action. Unlike a TV program, a >Web page doesn't have to be compelling even when viewed in disconnected >snippets, because there's nothing that corresponds to viewing it in >disconnected snippets. A Web site doesn't have to be designed to appeal >to people who are paying only partial attention to it, and in fact >*shouldn't* be designed that way, because such a design is quite annoying >to people who *are* paying full attention. > This is true, but doesn't really challenge my points. Thanx for the comments. Without statistics either way, neither of us can be sure. I hear what you say, but I'm still not sure that web sites have any more pull than tv shows. I certainly believe that site designers who challenge their audiences are less likely to gain mass appeal than those designers who go for the tried and tested "safe" approach. But as I've said quite a few times now, there are no hard and fast rules, only general guidelines as to what people do and like. The most interesting points in art (etc) are almost always created by someone breaking the rules. I'm only discussing mass appeal here. Alan Silver %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% "B.P. - iSpelunker.com" schrieb: > Several discussions/arguements in here concerning multiple pages designs > for multiple pages have always pointed to jakob Neilsen as the source > and idol for purist web design and about how a good webdesign will fit > any and all devices. You got it all wrong. Nielsen is the guru of usability. But he's not the guru of purist webdesign, and he's not the guru of good webdesign. These are three different sects, and you'd be hard put to find them agreeing on anything. Matthias Gutfeldt --------- > You got it all wrong. Nielsen is the guru of usability. ... Or, to use my own preferred terminology, there are the "structuralists," who favor the use of logical structure and adherence to consistent standards; the "presentationalists," who favor making sites look fancy without regard to logic or standards; the "usabilityists," who favor doing whatever their studies show best promotes usability within the expected audience of the site (which tends to lead them to designs that are closer to the structuralist than the presentationalist approach, but not invariably so); and the "contentists," who are just trying to put content online without paying much attention to any of the other attributes (they'll probably just upload whatever their development software spits out, whether it's plain ASCII, a PDF file, an MS Word file, crappy HTML from a WYSIWYG editor, etc.). And, to give particular examples of people in each of these categories, and URLs where they expound their ideas: 1) Structuralists: Myself: http://www.dantobias.com/webtips/ Alan Flavell: http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/www/ Paul Clark: http://www.sysmag.com/web/html-purity.html Jukka Korpela: http://www.hut.fi/~jkorpela/webpub.html 2) Presentationalists: David Siegel: http://www.dsiegel.com/ Joe Gillepsie: http://www.wpdfd.com/ Harry Pattinson: http://www.urban75.com/Mag/webrant.html 3) Usabilityists: Jakob Nielsen: http://www.useit.com/ Bruce Tognazzini: http://www.asktog.com/columns/015WebDesignRant.html 4) Contentists: [all over the place on the Web, but by definition not particularly interested in the philosophy or mechanics of Web development, so don't generally write Web pages on the subject] 5) Hard to Classify: Jorn Barger: http://www.robotwisdom.com/web/structure.html Daniel R. Tobias -------------- Thomas Jespersen wrote: > B.P. wrote: > > My proposal is this. We take screen shots of several "purist" sites and > > several "presentationalist" sites. I have a model for a research > > project done in a psych class many years ago regarding perceived traits > > and attractiveness. > > That survey would pretty much be in favour of the presentationalists. That depends on what questions were researched. If the subjects were asked to locate information on thee web, or actually make use of the pages (e.g to make a genuine selection from a shopping list, and actually order the goods) rather than merely visually rating the pages, things might look rather different. Mind you, all too often nowadays when I'm using search engines to look for information on a topic of interest to me, the search engines keep showing me my own pages, near the top of their list! Considering that "statistics show" (well, I don't really believe those statistics in any detail either, but you know what I mean) that a large proportion of web pages are found via search engines, there has to be some kind of message in that. One of my psychologist colleagues did once remark "tell me what answer you want, and I'll design a survey to prove it". Alan J. Flavell %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Alan Silver wrote: >Claus Färber writes >>I'd recomment the following tools: >> >>tidy >>sgmlnorm > >Do you use SP ? I downloaded it and couldn't make head nor tail of it. >How do you use it to validate HTML ? When you unzip it, be sure to use the option that preserves directories. Then point your browser at nsgmls.htm in the doc subdirectory. Stan Brown %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% IBM: I Blame Mathematics IBM: I'm Busi, Man! I'll Buy Macintosh. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Subject: Re: I love you From: waltdnes@waltdnes.org (Walter Dnes) Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email On Thu, 04 May 2000 11:17:05 -0400, Ron Ritzman, wrote: > > kindly check the attached LOVELETTER coming from me. > > ___________ > |love-letter| > |4-U.txt.VB | > |Please be | > |an idiot | > |and click | > |me | > ----------- ______________________________________________ | Hello, I'm the linux version of I Love You. | | I work on the honor system: | | | | If you're running a variant of unix or | | linux, please forward this message to | | everyone you know and delete a bunch of | | your files at random. | ----------------------------------------------- -------------------------------- "You have just received the "Redneck Virus" As we ain't got no programming experience, this virus works on the honor system. Please manually forward this virus to everyone on your mailing list and delete all the files from your hard drive. Thanks for your cooperation, University of Alabama Computer Engineering Dept." %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% "The box said Windows 95 or better so I installed Linux". %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% -- begin LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs I'm a signature virus. Copy me! end http://www.faerber.muc.de %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% randau wrote: >Has anyone else noticed that MS-Explorer and Netscape Navigator >browsers process related
 tags differently?

Yes. And it's not surprising.

>In Netscape Navigator the  tag is active within the 
>block of text whether the  tag occurs before or after the 
 tag.

A  tag inside a 
 element is a syntax error. And
... is a syntax error too. Anything you see a browser do
is just "error processing" (that's an euphemism for symptoms of
browsers' indigestion when fed up with rotten tag sallad).

>And,  header tags produce 'proportional' fonts in 
>blocks of text.

Any  tag inside a 
 element is a syntax error.

See http://www.htmlhelp.org/reference/html40/block/pre.html for a
summary of the PRE element. Note especially the "Contents" and
"Contained in" parts. (The authoritative specification, as regards to
such syntax issues, consists of the formal syntax rules at
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/dtd.html )

>However, in MS-Explore the  tag is only active within the 
>block of text if the  tag occurs after the 
 tag.
>Otherwise, the 
 block of text uses the default fixed space font.

This is just different error processing.

>This only seems to occur with the  tag.  Other tags like
>(bold) or 
are active within the
 tag whether or not
>they occur before or after the 
 tag.

 ... is a syntax error. But  markup is allowed inside 
elements; and I don't think there are browser differences in processing
it.

>So, which is the 'correct' HTML implementation of preformatted text
>with respect to  and  tags?

Any. The specifications impose no requirements on error processing.

The syntax was defined so that markup that could change the font size is
not allowed inside 
 elements. The reason is that 
 is intended
for preformatted text to be displayed "as is", using a monospace font.
If you have a need for using markup that might change the font size or
face, you should probably use some other markup than 
.

Due to the way element nesting rules can be specified, the syntax also
forbids e.g.  inside 
. If you wish to make the
document syntactically valid, you can use  markup and CSS instead
(e.g. ... inside 
 and a CSS rule like
 .key { color: #f00; background: #fff none; }).


Jukka Korpela

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

   Subject: MP3 players, skins: why
      Date: Sat, 08 Apr 2000 07:38:07 -0700
      From: Jonathan Sachs 
Newsgroups: comp.human-factors


I've recently been looking at MP3 player software. I've found that
most of the players come with "skins": user interfaces which can be
redesigned by any programmer, and can be replaced at will by the user.

Most of the skins seem to range from the unconventional to the
bizarre. Quite apart from disregarding most of the principles of
usability (and the GUI's design guidelines), they go out of their way
to make the the program look like something it is not: a 1930's juke
box, or a Star Trek tricorder.

The users seem to love it. Much of the traffic in MP3 related
newsgroups concerns skins rather than the players themselves. Some
users appear to collect skins the way some people collect screen
savers.

I'm baffled by this. Why do users of a program whose function is
essentially aural attach so much importance to the program's
appearance? And why are they so delighted by designs that generally
get in the way of the program's usability, rather than enhance it?

------------------
Jonathan Sachs wrote:
> I've recently been looking at MP3 player software...

I think this question goes far beyond MP3 skins into most aspects of life,
and I think it addresses an important issue. The thing we need to be looking
at here is not the simple act of listening to musicon the computer but
people's overall experience of music. I would bet if you look at the
experience of using one's computer for music, what people aspire to goes
beyond simple functionality. People like personalization, they like to be
able to make their things reflect their personality, be it via player skins
or a colored iMac or a shelf stereo in brushed steel with wood trim instead
of black plastic.

Simply put, usability and functionality are just just one aspect of the
person's experience. There are any number of CD players out there available
for free or already installed on the computer, all with about equal
functionality. But those with skins afford the person the chance to enhance
their experience, allow them to make it more their own experience, allow
them to express their own identity in one more way instead of having only
the standard windows dialog box structure.

I'd be interested in knowing about the overall user level of those who
switch out skins on their MP3 players. The level of user who would go in
search of Winamp and download it, then download MP3's and skins, is probably
an advanced enough user that the changes in usability are only a minimal
impediment, if at all. It would also not surprise me if such a person uses
their computer enough in any given day or week that the personalization of
their experience with it is more important to them than to the majority of
people who use their computers less often.


Colin William

------------------

"Colin William" wrote:

>I'd be interested in knowing about the overall user level of those who
>switch out skins on their MP3 players...

I can give you two data points on this.

1. I'm a computer professional, so I qualify as an advanced user and I
spend a lot of time using my computer. My attitude toward skins is
implied clearly by the original post: life is too short for this type
of nonsense.

The unconventional user interfaces impede usability by invalidating my
expectations of how a Windows program works. Theoretically simple
operations cease to be intuitive, and require guessing games. It's not
clear to me how much of this is inherent in the notion of skins, how
much is caused by the individual designers of skins, and how much is
coincidental. I'm sure the mindset that encourages skins because
they're "cool," also encourages nonstandard interfaces because they're
"cool."

2. My wife is also a computer professional. She uses an MP3 player and
fools around with skins at least a little bit. She says I don't like
them because I have no sense of fun and no understanding of style.


Jonathan Sachs

------------------

Jonathan Sachs  wrote
> 1. I'm a computer professional, ....
>
> 2. My wife is also a computer professional. ...  She says I don't like
> them because I have no sense of fun and no understanding of style.
>

:-)

I would put it this way - it's just not a part of your aspired experience.
People have different perceptions of the role of the computer and the things
they do with it, and different aspirations for different software. The
people who design nonstandard interfaces need to consider the kind of
aspirations people have for the experience in question.

So, for instance, an MP3 player falls into the category of an entertainment
or music-listening experience. This is clearly more variable across people
than, say, the experiences of which word processing is a part. The desired
level of richness vs. the necessary level of usability is a tradeoff that
people are clearly willing to make for this software.

OTOH, those who design nonstandard "cool" interfaces where people have no
such experiential aspirations are walking into a minefield of their own
creation. That's a major decision to make, and if your product is one off of
which you are looking to make major money and you don't do user research up
front to find out if people want that, you're in trouble.


Colin William

------------------

Jonathan Sachs wrote:
: The unconventional user interfaces impede usability by invalidating my
: expectations of how a Windows program works. Theoretically simple
: operations cease to be intuitive, and require guessing games. It's not
                                                         ^^^^^
: clear to me how much of this is inherent in the notion of skins, how
: much is caused by the individual designers of skins, and how much is
: coincidental. I'm sure the mindset that encourages skins because
: they're "cool," also encourages nonstandard interfaces because they're
: "cool."

I think you answered your question right there.  For most users, MP3
players and the like are entertainment accessories, not task-oriented
tools.  They're things that the users play with rather than working with. 
Part of the appeal of a game is the challenge in learning how to play
it--ordinary task-oriented usability guidelines hardly make sense when
applied to video games--and I suspect many of these users are dedicated
game-players who view such things as MP3 players as an extension of the
gaming experience.  Entertainment software differs from other software in
that it's an end in itself rather than a means to an end.  The goal of
usability in the conventional sense is to enable the user to focus his/her
attention as much as possible on the task itself rather than the tools to
accomplish the task.  But this paradigm simply doesn't apply to
entertainment software, where there's no "task" and the interaction
between the user and the interface is the whole *point* of the software. 


Eric Bohlman

------------------

Eric Bohlman wrote:

>I think you answered your question right there.  For most users, MP3
>players and the like are entertainment accessories, not task-oriented
>tools.

I'm taking your response as representative of several. These responses
make sense, but they aren't satisfying to me.

I can't agree that an MP3 player, because its purpose is
entertainment, is therefore not a task oriented tool. I can identify
several tasks it has to perform, such as: finding a desired file,
playing the file when desired, and controlling the quality of the
sound produced. If the user cannot figure out how to perform these
tasks, the tool will be difficult and frustrating to use. The user's
pattern of usage is very different from that of a word processor, for
example, and this will certainly affect the nature and degree of
frustration, but the essential problem is the same.

The other part of the puzzle, which no one has addressed, is that
virtually *all* MP3 players seem to have skins, usually elaborate
ones. It's as if it all of the radios on the market were designed to
look like cartoon characters, charm bracelets, or classic cars. I can
understand that some of these programs' users enjoy the non-functional
aspect for all of these reasons cited, but how did the genre develop
so that skins are perceived as a basic feature, and users who do not
want them have a difficult time?


Jonathan Sachs

------------------

Jonathan Sachs wrote:
>... but how did the genre develop
> so that skins are perceived as a basic feature, and users who do not
> want them have a difficult time? ...

Target market. The primary users of MP3 players are not the same group
of people as the primary users of word processors. MP3 player users, I
would suggest, are those who have the time and the interest to learn the
nuances and eccentricities of half a dozen different skins for the same
player. They're probably the same people who install WindowBlinds or Kaleidoscope.

It's ironic, I suppose, that by indulging themselves in this skin craze,
the MP3 `community' (if there is such a thing) is probably actually
impeding the MP3 revolution it is striving for, by making MP3s difficult
to use.

The latest Suck is interesting here:
|
| "Skins" are a recent product of the hyper-democratization of code. The
| computer equivalent of back-ally chin tucks, skins allow a growing
| number of applications to change their looks in a growing number of
| ways, almost all of them bad. In a scenario that undoubtedly leaves
| DeTocqueville twitching uncomfortably in his grave, an unthinking
| Jolt- and marketing-fueled push towards visual freedom -- is leaving
| 15 years of common-sense progress in user-interface design bleeding in
| a ditch.
|



Matthew Thomas

------------------

Matthew Thomas wrote:

> It's ironic, I suppose, that by indulging themselves in this skin craze,
> the MP3 `community' (if there is such a thing) is probably actually
> impeding the MP3 revolution it is striving for, by making MP3s difficult
> to use.

This sounds to me sort of, well, distasteful. So users are seeking out the
experiences they aspire to, seeking to have their software and their
operating environment the way they want it, and you see this as a bad
thing? "Indulging themselves in this skin craze" sounds a little
condescending. I mean, if this was being forced down the throats of users
who want no part of it that'd be one thing, but this is a chosen route by
people with the ability to handle it. That is, if you have the ability to
navigate enough to find, download and use both an MP3 player and MP3's
themselves, and to download and attach and browse and use skins, then it's
a trivial issue that Winamp happens to have that strange st of buttons for
navigating and playing the MP3's. 
 
> The latest Suck is interesting here:
> |
> | "Skins" are a recent product of the hyper-democratization of code. The
> | computer equivalent of back-ally chin tucks, skins allow a growing
> | number of applications to change their looks in a growing number of
> | ways, almost all of them bad. In a scenario that undoubtedly leaves
> | DeTocqueville twitching uncomfortably in his grave, an unthinking
> | Jolt- and marketing-fueled push towards visual freedom -- is leaving
> | 15 years of common-sense progress in user-interface design bleeding in
> | a ditch.
> |
Sounds to me like some computer person getting all huffy that his
functional but boring-looking interface isn't getting used. Wah.

It would be one thing, like I said above, if this was being forced down
people's throats. But it's not. This is at an individual, choice-oriented
level, be it for MP3 player skins or browser skins. If someone is stupid
enough to start doing this as a part of a major, multi-featured,
mass-market program, then that person gets what they deserve. This is no
death knell for well-honed principles of interface design, those will
continue to be refined and used.

What it simply means is that those who have the ability are choosing not
to be constrained by interfaces that might have been desiggned to be
intuitive for all people. For them, simplicity is secondary to personality
and design. I'm sure they are not aspiring to have a Star Trek theme skin
corrupting the UI for their copy of Visual Studio. But such low-level,
low-interaction programs afford them the opportunity to express themselves
with minimal costs.

Which is not to say that within these structures usability should be
ignored, just that this sort of mentality does not mean the death knell
for usable software.

Colin T. William

------------------

>This sounds to me sort of, well, distasteful. So users are seeking 
>out the experiences they aspire to, seeking to have their software 
>and their operating environment the way they want it, and you see 
>this as a bad thing?

I think the point he was making (and I agree with it) is that by
catering to the peculiar desires of a group of early adopters, the
developers of this software are making it hard for themselves to break
out into the mainstream.

Another point many people seem to be missing is that the odd user
interfaces do more than merely make certain operations difficult to
figure out.

In many cases they make the operations difficult to perform even when
understood. By ignoring standards, skin designers force themselves to
reinvent everything that the software design community has discovered,
after great effort and considerable pain, over a period of two
decades. Often they don't do a very good job.

In some cases, these odd interfaces actually make important operations
impossible. For example, many MP3 players have elaborate "play list"
features that make it easy (once you figure out how) to combine song
tracks into sequences that can be played automatically, like the
tracks on a tape. In most cases these features impose a structure on
the directories used to store recordings, and that may conflict with a
user's established file management habits. I tried one popular MP3
player which simply assumed that all of the sound tracks belong in a
directory structure under the directory that holds the executable
file. That created a little problem for me, since I segregate my data
files from my executables so that I can back them up regularly without
the overhead of backing up gigabytes of files that never change. That
program went straight into the recycle bin.


Jonathan Sachs

------------------

Jonathan Sachs wrote:

> I think the point he was making (and I agree with it) is that by
> catering to the peculiar desires of a group of early adopters, the
> developers of this software are making it hard for themselves to break
> out into the mainstream.

Well, I took it to mean he thought it would keep MP3's from being popular,
not the individual players themselves. The sheer number and variety of
players will afford an array of users the chance to get what they really
want.

And let's not forget, this isn't a terribly small-scale thing. There are a
lot of these skins out there and a lot of people adopting them.
 
> Another point many people seem to be missing is that the odd user
> interfaces do more than merely make certain operations difficult to
> figure out.
> In many cases they make the operations difficult to perform even when
> understood. By ignoring standards, skin designers force themselves to
> reinvent everything that the software design community has discovered,
> after great effort and considerable pain, over a period of two
> decades. Often they don't do a very good job.

And if that is so important to people, then well-designed ones will
succeed and poorly-designed ones will fail. But I think you are
overestimating the role of the interface in general in using this
particular program. On a larger scale, in programs that people use at
lengh for more in-depth tasks, there things get more complex.

> In some cases, these odd interfaces actually make important operations
> impossible. For example, many MP3 players have elaborate "play list"
> features that make it easy (once you figure out how) to combine song
> tracks into sequences that can be played automatically, like the
> tracks on a tape.
(snipped)

Now you are talking about something entirely different, the functionality
of the programs themselves as opposed to skins that merely go on top of
that functionality. I would agree that the underlying functionality needs
work. But where I disagree is that this notion that users being able to
reinvent how their interface looks is a bad thing. If they have the
know-how to get that far, then it doesn't harm them to change the look
with skins. The quote that really got me was:
"an unthinking...push toward visual freedom is leaving 15 years of common
sense progress in user-interface design bleeding in a ditch."

I mean, if this was being correctly applied to the discussion we were
having on
skins, then what arrogance! We aspire to make things usable for the user.
Why? To improve their computing experience I thought. But that is a very
_generic_ experiential model. What is wrong with people, at an individual
level, having the freedom to mess around with their own interface, in
order to enhance their experience to what they want? If a user wants to
put a skin on that expresses their personality while reducing usability
just a tad, then what arrogance does it show on our part to say "No, you
shouldn't do that." What, we know their aspired experience better than
they do? No, we know more about one aspect of it, but not the whole
experieence at the individual level.

I have no problem with objecting to designers going willy-nilly on
exercising their creative freedom on interface design without regard to
the user. But objecting to users doing so for their own experience? That's
absurd.


"Colin T. William

------------------

>> In some cases, these odd interfaces actually make important operations
>> impossible...

>Now you are talking about something entirely different, the functionality
>of the programs themselves as opposed to skins that merely go on top of
>that functionality.

I am talking about the same thing in both cases. The mindset of the
designer which places so much emphasis on skins is the same as the
mindset that dismisses the lessons of GUI history as unimportant.

Returning again to my original question, my purpose is not to beat
designers about the head for providing skins, or the users for wanting
them. I am trying to *understand* why people like skins so much, even
at the obvious (obvious to me) expense of usability.

It occurs to me that the skin phenomenon is not unique. Looking at
magazines and web sites that cater to young people, I often see the
same thing: design that emphasizes novelty, and usability and
readability be damned. Evidently that works. The magazines sell.

I'd be the last person to try to prevent a creative person from
creating what he pleases, or a user from running, reading, or sniffing
what he pleases. Personally, though, I'm discouraged to see so many
people content to create or use stuff that is merely different,
instead of going for the difficult but supremely important task of
creating or discovering something new that is better than anything
that came before it.


Jonathan Sachs

------------------

Jonathan Sachs wrote:
>
>I am talking about the same thing in both cases. The mindset of the
>designer which places so much emphasis on skins is the same as the
>mindset that dismisses the lessons of GUI history as unimportant.
>
>Returning again to my original question, my purpose is not to beat
>designers about the head for providing skins, or the users for wanting
>them. I am trying to *understand* why people like skins so much, even
>at the obvious (obvious to me) expense of usability.
>

Is there not a risk that we are falling into the trap of replacing the
discredited "the developer is always right" attitude with a
soon-to-be-discredited "the UI specialist is always right".

There is a fundamental scientific principle which says that if reality does
not match your hypothesis then your hypothesis is wrong.  If the users
clearly and demonstrably prefer the skin interface then any usability theory
which says otherwise must be wrong.  To be honest there has been quite a lot
of work done on the social and psychological aspects of UI design which can
quite happily explain why users are downloading and using mp3 skins - but
many UI professionals seem to disregard this work because it is
non-quantitative and 'soft'.

>It occurs to me that the skin phenomenon is not unique. Looking at
>magazines and web sites that cater to young people, I often see the
>same thing: design that emphasizes novelty, and usability and
>readability be damned. Evidently that works. The magazines sell.
>
>I'd be the last person to try to prevent a creative person from
>creating what he pleases, or a user from running, reading, or sniffing
>what he pleases. Personally, though, I'm discouraged to see so many
>people content to create or use stuff that is merely different,
>instead of going for the difficult but supremely important task of
>creating or discovering something new that is better than anything
>that came before it.


Better in what way?  This is the key question and you cannot just assume
that more efficient == better.  Sometimes you need to put the GOMS analysis
(or whatever tools you use) away and ask "is it fun, do people like it"
because users are not rational automatons but complex emotional _people_.

In this context you have to remember that this is _leisure_ software and
that for most people leisure activities are a pleasurable way to kill time.
Taking a few more moments to complete a leisure task may then actually be
"better" in this context so long as it is pleasurable to the user.


Nic Hughes

------------------

> >> In some cases, these odd interfaces actually make important operations
> >> impossible...
> 
> >Now you are talking about something entirely different, the functionality
> >of the programs themselves as opposed to skins that merely go on top of
> >that functionality.
> 
> I am talking about the same thing in both cases. The mindset of the
> designer which places so much emphasis on skins is the same as the
> mindset that dismisses the lessons of GUI history as unimportant.

Not true, because you are mixing levels of aspiration. You are taking a
personal decision on an individual's part as to what they consider
important, not just in terms of usability but in terms of the whole
experience, and lumping it in with generic principles of good design for
everyone.

It's one thing for a designer to make a cool-looking but unusable
interface and say "Here ya go" and you're stuck with it. It's entirely
different for a huge array of skins to be available for people to choose
to use. The first pigeonholes people into an unusable structure, the
second allows peope to make a decision as to the relative importance to
them, at an individual level, of form vs. functionality.  Good usability
will make all sorts of sacrifices of form to get to good usability, and
that's not a bad thing. But it also assumes that's what ALL people want,
and I think these skins are evidence that this is in fact NOT what all
people want.

I think skins then serve as a beneficial think from the perspective of the
UI designer. If a program allows skins, the UI designer can start with a
highly usable interface that is good for all the people, then allow the
people to modify their own personal interfaces to their own personal
preferred balance of form and function. The UI designer becomes less
constrained in making these tradeoffs.

One key, of course, if for UI designers to accept that not all the people
will choose to see their own personal creation. That can be a blow to the
ego, especially for those who consider themselves "experts." But the
flipside is that the UI designer better addresses user experience, you get
to go beyond the one aspect that had previously defined everything. Not be
creating a wacky-cool interface, but by creating the environment in which
people can decide what they want and experiment to find what works best
for their style of work and personality.
 
> Returning again to my original question, my purpose is not to beat
> designers about the head for providing skins, or the users for wanting
> them. I am trying to *understand* why people like skins so much, even
> at the obvious (obvious to me) expense of usability.

I think the above states it. Just like social scientists, UI designers
have to accept the fact of individual differences. Computers mean
different things to different people. For some it is almost entirely a
tool, so expressiveness will be less important than functionality. For
others the computer is more than that, and skins are a part of a greater
role, as with the iMac, colored panels for PCs, cute backgrounds and icons
and screen savers (my wife has a beagle cursor that is harder to use than
the arrow but that she loves because it's a part of her self-expression).
People love to express themselves, a lot of them do not want to have every
aspect of design handed to them on a plate.

> I'd be the last person to try to prevent a creative person from
> creating what he pleases, or a user from running, reading, or sniffing
> what he pleases. Personally, though, I'm discouraged to see so many
> people content to create or use stuff that is merely different,
> instead of going for the difficult but supremely important task of
> creating or discovering something new that is better than anything
> that came before it.

Not sure which people you are talking about here. If an individual wants
to create for their own use an interface that is different, then we have
no business condemning it. The designers who are starting to incorporate
skins, though, are doing something new that might well be better than
anything before it - affording the UI designer and the individual a chance
to work together to create the ideal experience of using the software. The
UI designer can work to create something that is easy and intuitive and
has as nice a form as can be created within those constraints. The user
then can tailor the UI to their needs within the greater context.

Frankly, I think that's a hell of a good thing to do. If the designer
doesn't create a decent base interface, then that's a problem, but the
idea that the user can then make that interface into something that
addresses their own personal and individual need to balance form and
function at their own level of ability, that is something truly great.


Colin T. William

------------------

Colin T. William wrote
> ...
> I mean, if this was being correctly applied to the discussion we were
> having on
> skins, then what arrogance! We aspire to make things usable for the user.
> Why? To improve their computing experience I thought. But that is a very
> _generic_ experiential model. What is wrong with people, at an individual
> level, having the freedom to mess around with their own interface, in
> order to enhance their experience to what they want? If a user wants to
> put a skin on that expresses their personality while reducing usability
> just a tad, then what arrogance does it show on our part to say "No, you
> shouldn't do that." What, we know their aspired experience better than
> they do? No, we know more about one aspect of it, but not the whole
> experieence at the individual level.
> ...

I'd say because people often don't know what's good for them.


David Jacques

------------------

> I'd say because people often don't know what's good for them.   

And I'd agree, but now you're mixing contexts to support the arrogance of
this quote. It's one thing if you assume the user knows what is good for
them in asking them what they want from an interface, because what they
say they want and what they use and react well to will often be
inconsistent.

But, if I am making the decision to apply a skin on Winamp at home, and I
decide it very much pleases me, and that the half a second extra it takes
me to find a button at first is inconsequential compared to what this
contributes to my overall music-listening experience, then just who are
you to assert that, at an individual level, I do not know what is good for
me? If at a personal level expressiveness is worth more to me than a
smidgen of usability, then for you to say otherwise is just wrong.

It might be right for you to make such decisions at a global level in
churning out software for the masses, especially non-entertainment
software, but at an individual level where I make the decision for myself,
where I make a decision regarding my whole experience (not jsut the narrow
sliver of usability), you just do not know as well as I do what I want.


Colin T. William

------------------

>I'd say because people often don't know what's good for them.
>

Oh dear.  All that work in the field of HCI only to have a slightly
different IT professional (UI specialist rather than developer) tell the
user that "we know best".  Sad.

Look at it this way, skins are one of the few areas where a significant
number of users are able to select user interfaces according to their
preferences unprejudiced by differences in the underlying functionality.
HCI professionals should be using the real user selections as a way to learn
about real user priorities, not telling the users that they "don't know
what's good for them".


Nic Hughes

------------------

>>I'd say because people often don't know what's good for them.
>>
>Oh dear.  All that work in the field of HCI only to have a slightly
>different IT professional (UI specialist rather than developer) tell the
>user that "we know best".  Sad.

I agree. Reading this thread makes me feel like I'm listening to the industrial
planners of the early 1900's telling workers how much happier they will be with
the new production-line methods. 

If we learn anything at all from HCI and from the impact of mass-production in
the 20th Century, it should be that humans are not machines. Efficiency is not
the be-all-and-end-all of human activity (espacialy not with entertainment
tools!!!)

Let's all remember that usability is not an end in itself - rather, it is a
tool to be used (or not used) to help humans reach human goals.


Sanchm

------------------

>>I'd say because people often don't know what's good for them.
>
>Oh dear.  All that work in the field of HCI only to have a slightly
>different IT professional (UI specialist rather than developer) tell the
>user that "we know best".  Sad.

Not necessarily sad.  There are many contexts where people make
decisions that are bad for them.  The minimum response for those that
think otherwise should be to point that out, and suggest alternatives.

But that isn't to say that people shouldn't be free to do what they
want if they choose to ignore the advice.  In the case of skins, the
harm people can cause themselves is clearly minimal, so what the heck?


Steve Slatcher

------------------

>Not necessarily sad.  There are many contexts where people make
>decisions that are bad for them.  The minimum response for those that
>think otherwise should be to point that out, and suggest alternatives.
>

The correct response however is to question whether your definitions of good
and bad interfaces are correct and relevant to the context.  In the context
of leisure software you simply cannot assume that the common commercial
measures (easy to learn, rapid throughput etc) apply because of the
overwhelming evidence to the contrary - including skins but of course
computer games are the most compelling example.

So yes it is sad, it appears that some HCI professionals have a fixed set of
criteria for "good HCI" which are being applied regardless of the social
context and the obvious desire of the users.  From a user perspective its
right back to square one with a computer professional telling them what is
best for them.

>But that isn't to say that people shouldn't be free to do what they
>want if they choose to ignore the advice.  In the case of skins, the
>harm people can cause themselves is clearly minimal, so what the heck?

They do themselves *no harm* by enjoying themselves, if they enjoy
themselves for a second longer because the interface is "inefficient" then
that's good.


Nic Hughes

------------------

David Jacques wrote:
> I'd say because people often don't know what's good for them.

Meaning that users think they are happy using the software as it is, but
they don't know that it could be much better. A little like that story where
a bunch of revolutionaries go to free this slave who was working in his
master's house. The doesn't want to leave, saying "My master is good to me,
he doesn't beat me so much, I'm happy here, why would I leave?".

Users who don't know that software can be usable won't care if it isn't.
They have no better model to compare to.


David Jacques

------------------

Anyway, this is a piece of sotfware with limited functionality and if users
WANT it difficult to use, if they take pleasure in discovering the
functions, then Skins serve their purpose well and make users happy. Can't
blame that.


David Jacques

------------------

>Meaning that users think they are happy using the software as it is, but
>they don't know that it could be much better.

I think you miss my point a little.  Your definition of the word "better" is
misguided because you cannot define the users true goals (relax, be happy,
chill out) in terms of efficiency and ergonomics.  Skins emotionally engage
the user of the software and clearly many users have a strong liking for
them, so long as the user is not frustrated by the interface (as which point
love quickly turns to hate) efficiency and throughput are almost entirely
irrelevant.  It could be argued that a more efficient interface would be
*worse* because it would shorten the pleasurable experience.

>Users who don't know that software can be usable won't care if it isn't.
>They have no better model to compare to.
>

Which is clearly not the case here because they are installing skins onto an
existing - more ergonomic - interface.


Nic Hughes

------------------

Jonathan Sachs wrote:
> 
> The other part of the puzzle, which no one has addressed, is that
> virtually *all* MP3 players seem to have skins, usually elaborate
> ones. It's as if it all of the radios on the market were designed to
> look like cartoon characters, charm bracelets, or classic cars. I can
> understand that some of these programs' users enjoy the non-functional
> aspect for all of these reasons cited, but how did the genre develop
> so that skins are perceived as a basic feature, and users who do not
> want them have a difficult time?

Users who don't want them don't have a difficult time; they simply use
the standard skin, which on MP3 players I've seen looks very much like a
standard tape deck or CD player. Those who want to personalize can
download skins and apply them, and if their desire for what they
consider aesthetically pleasing is greater than their annoyance from
hard-to-find controls, who's to say they're wrong?

(Personally, I think that the Malachite skin for RealJukebox is great.
And none of the controls are visible. But I don't care, because it's
cool to look at. And because none of the controls are visible.)


Emily Bristor

------------------

> I think you answered your question right there.  For most users, MP3
> players and the like are entertainment accessories, not task-oriented
> tools.

Note that the level of learnability is a usability (and success) issue of
many games and the "challenge in learning how to play" is not a goal in
every game. Some game pulishers have learned (hopefully) in the past that
the "learning curve" and ease-of-use is indeed an issue for the commercial
success of the software.

The MP3 software, for now anyway, has very limit features and the fun of
finding where these features are doesn't last very long. Though some new
skins have bad usability because of knowledge transfer from the use of
previous skins, the learning curve is not steep. The focus is really just on
the look. Add many more features and funtionality to those MP3 players and
the unusable interfaces will quickly become frustrating for the users, and
eventually become abandoned.

I wouldn't worry about customization becoming a general usability-crippling
trend.


David Jacques

------------------

>...
> I'd be interested in knowing about the overall user level of those who
> switch out skins on their MP3 players. The level of user who would go
> in search of Winamp and download it, then download MP3's and skins, is
> probably an advanced enough user that the changes in usability are
> only a minimal impediment, if at all.
>...

The other main reason for skinnability being so popular in media
players, I think, is that with media players a relatively tiny
proportion of the time spent using the program is spent using the actual
interface. Most of the time the program is open, it's just sitting there
playing something. So the usability of the interface is less important,
and the aesthetics are more important, then in other software genres.


Matthew `mpt' Thomas

------------------

Jonathan Sachs wrote:
: I've recently been looking at MP3 player software. I've found that
: most of the players come with "skins": user interfaces which can be
: redesigned by any programmer, and can be replaced at will by the user.
...
: I'm baffled by this. Why do users of a program whose function is
: essentially aural attach so much importance to the program's
: appearance? And why are they so delighted by designs that generally
: get in the way of the program's usability, rather than enhance it?

They're for fun dummie. Does a degree preclude common sense?


Tom Line

------------------

Jonathan Sachs wrote:

> I've recently been looking at MP3 player software. I've found that
> most of the players come with "skins" ...

> I'm baffled by this. Why do users of a program whose function is
> essentially aural attach so much importance to the program's
> appearance? And why are they so delighted by designs that generally
> get in the way of the program's usability, rather than enhance it?

It is not merely MP3 players that "suffer" the abundance of skins, you
can now download hundreds of different appearances for web browsers and
the like as well.

Basically, I feel it boils down to a user's relationship with their
computer - the desire to personalise or otherwise create a custom
appearance is very strong in a lot of people. There are entire web sites
dedicated to Windows Themes, for example, or for the Macintosh-inclined
amongst us there is Kaleidoscope, a nifty tool that can change the
appearance of all of the basic building blocks in the Mac OS GUI.

People want their personal computers to be *their* personal computers,
and would rather have it look futuristic or neo-classical (for example)
than have to put up with the out-of-the-box appearance the mainstream
GUI makers foist onto the end user. I know plenty of Mac people who are
perfectly happy with the way things stand with their Mac OS, but I don't
know a single Windows user who *likes* the default Microsoft theme
settings (my brother-in-law's desktop looks and sounds like a Duke Nukem
game, a friend's Windows desktop looks like the bridge from the
Enterprise-D, and so on).


Brains

------------------

>The users seem to love it.

Correct, and that is surely the only usability principle that truly matters.
If your usability principles state that something has stinky-bad usability
yet users love it so much that they go to considerable time and effort
(downloading and installing) to achieve the effect then your principles are
flawed.

MP3 players are entertainment software and the users are having a bit of
fun.  It really is that simple.

>
>I'm baffled by this. Why do users of a program whose function is
>essentially aural attach so much importance to the program's
>appearance? And why are they so delighted by designs that generally
>get in the way of the program's usability, rather than enhance it?

I think you overestimate the importance of measurable usability factors as
opposed to 'softer' social and pychological factors which are harder to
quantify.  Or to put it another way - nobody cares if they use their leisure
time inefficiently so long as they are having fun doing it.


Nic Hughes

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HTM-Hell

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FrontPain

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Joe wrote:
>ERROR: HTML 4.0 requires the TYPE attribute to specify the scripting
>language for the SCRIPT element.
>

>
>