I hate popup windows. I have a popup-blocker on my web browser. I open any links that are targeted to open in a new window (target=”_blank” for you HTML geeks) in new tabs. “No sir, I don’t like ‘em.”
I think you should hate popup windows, too. Today, I took a step towards a popup-free kennsarah.net by replacing the comments popup window with a link to the Comments section of the individual article. “Bam, boom, baby!”
The link looks something like this in the MovableType template:
<a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#comments">Comments</a>
Free your site from unwanted popups. Build a website that doesn’t suck.™ You know you want to.
K,
Will you be publishing the complete list of certified requirements for “web sites that don’t suck”?
Pez
I don’t think opening a target=”_blank” is considered a pop-up window. Pop-ups are unwanted poping browsers when you don’t click. And by the way, MYIE2 web browser automatically opens target=”_blank” pages in new tabs- as it also does with popups… But I agree to a point, the MT pop-up a comment box is kinda dumb. I think I’ll try and fix that on our site too. Someday…
Pez, your suggestion is intriguing.
A few requirements off the top of my head to start:
web sites that don’t suck™
must not include…
1. Just-in-time Java mouse-over animation (use CSS or JavaScript for cryin’ out loud!).
2. Huge images that are resized to 25% with HTML attributes (a sure sign that they’re not hurting for bandwidth).
3. A gigantic navigational image or Flash (these guys did a nice mix of Flash and text, not just Flash).
4. Graphic layouts that only look good in IE (just lame).
5. Bubbly looking tabs (Pontiac and Microsoft get their design cues from the same inspiration).
must include…
1. A valid RSS feed.
2. Clever anecdotes.
3. Brian Cooley.
Not all popups are evil. I use them and design sites with them on a regular basis. Now, before you go all ape over me, let me give an example:
lets say your doing some research on a library website, you’ve entered your search criteria and gotten your results. Now, to make like easy for people (who refuse to browse the web in anything less than a full screen 1024×768 window and haven’t figured out how to “open in tab” or “open in new window”) to keep their search results and browse their findings in another window. Makes it easy to come back to what they searched for and have several windows open that they can toggle between and compare.
Also, there are some sites (such as slashdot and freshmeat) that really should use popups. After a site is slashdotted it can take for ever to load. So i usually pop it up in a new tab and read the comments while its loading. With freshmeat, i’ll generally pop open a bunch of homepages in tabs to read about the software and then close the main freshmeat window.
Yes, i do it myself and therefor shouldn’t be gripping that there is no popup, but, i think more people need to be forced into the beauty of multiple window web browsing. Far too many people don’t realise how much more convient it is to have multiple browser windows, with multiple tabs in each one.
Yes, i could be considered counter intuitive, but thats too bad, its better than having to hit forward and back
On the same note, I have “turn pop-ups off” in galeon and mozilla … java pop-ups bug the hell outta me and anyone that uses them should be drug into the street and beaten with a wet noodle.
btw: thanks for removing the popup on MT, that was one of my complaints about it …
Altp.
Hey Mike,
I pretty much use the tabs the same way you use multiple windows. For Phoenix, it’s nothing more than an extra keypress when I click on a link to open it into a new tab: Ctrl+click. Since I’m using my IBM trackpoint most of the time, I can one-hand that maneuver with my pinky and my thumb.
Any new tabs I need to open are Ctrl+T (the cursor focus automatically jumps to the URL box—mmmm…good UI design). It’s only when I want to do research on several different topics, which is rare, do I open another window for each topic where each of those windows have several tabs.
Regarding the MT mod, it’s really amazing what MT is capable of. All it takes is a little time for template-hacking and perusing the user manual (the death-to-comments-popup struck me when I realized that I’ve got an anchor tag on each of my permalink pages for Comments). I’m so looking forward to having some time over the summer to break more stuff on this site.
I think I need to get away from this extreme linkage from our homepage to a more relaxed design, too…
Why not include something like “websites that don’t suck…smooth out the jagged edges on their graphic headers.” Oh, and a target_blank isn’t a popup window, as someone else mentioned. Speaking of which, popups don’t suck if they ease navigation, instead of hindering it.
(Came in from oxymoronic.org/blog/, btw).
Ouch… which jaggys is she talkin’ about? Let me fix ‘em!… but first I gotta figure out what she’s talkin’ about…
Yeah, really. Of course, this is coming from someone whose website is one of the best designed blogs I’ve seen, so the smackdown is humbly noted.
At any rate, the jaggies in question are probably the ones at my shoulder, which I had planned to fix, sometime between the hours of 2:45 and 5:16 AM when I have attained a level of superhuman powers that make sleep unnecessary. If you’re game, Jai, it’s all yours.
Nice site you linked to there… I wish it had some navigation, but the design and theme are very well done.
Yeah, I guess I’ll see what I can do when I’m twiddling at work.
~do you have the original photograph of that?
Oy! I’m blushing…thanks for the compliment (although I really don’t deserve it, particularly after having acted so rashly). And you’re right, Jai, there is no more navigation there, and I don’t plan on putting any up. What you see there is a ghost of a site and is rarely updated. My “real” weblog used to be at mybluehouse.com/weblog/, but I took it down last April. But if you happened to stumble across a slew of articles re weblogging in places such as Time (this one was a good one) and the New York Times (this one, not so favorable) last February, you might have seen it mentioned in a few of them.
Becky, I noticed your comment about the people coming over from Time in one of your entries. That must have been an overwhelming amount of publicity. Did either of those news organizations call ahead of time?
erm…..popups suck end of story?
Well a _blank should not be considered a pop-up, although I find many sites that use that target when they REALLY shouldn’t, mostly flash sites with HTML frontpages.
I work on my own site to share my interests with people who visit it. But while that’s what you see, I really work on it to improve my skills and understanding of html and other languages. I’ll tell you one thing, I love CSS and want to learn PHP. I hate banners and ads and popups and pop-unders and all organic forms of bush.
My site is made out of frames, and to quickly address the stupid and ignorant, no, frames don’t suck (unless you are stupid and or ignorant). I have my search, music, and regualar pages all intergrated into the same window. There are only two instances where another window will open up from my website. First, unfortunitly I don’t know how to build my own chat room, so from the poor intial choice I have, I’d rather have it open in another window without ads, then not have a chat at all. Secondly, when you click on a clearly marked external link. There are two ways that you know they are external. First off, for the majority of users using IE6, the purple cursor hand has a capitol E to make the user aware that it is an external link. Secondly, the external links are all an aesthic blue (which turn white on rollover). I love CSS for these reasons and more. I feel that users that come to my site, have more forseeable knowledge and wisdom about what they are doing when they interact with my website, then when they go elsewhere. I mean, I have no reason to mis-represent a link on my site.
I run popup dummy at home. So far it hasn’t pissed me off. It’s the designers that piss me of abusing javascript which is otherwise a very useful and important langauge to helping me get visitors to see my website as intended. Browser and resolution detection ensure the site loads certain frame elements to stretch according to the resolution. Browser detection ensuring that browser with issues (Netscape 4) get redirected to pages with (in this cras code that is horridly written and achieves little more the plain and uninteresting effects) or provide the visitor with a very informative, “time to upgrade from web tv” notification.
It’s all a matter of the gap between programmers and users. Programmers don’t use it, they just go in and make it, and go home and get drunk..or something like that. If they actually used the software they create, they’d have made it better the first time or at least set the default settings to the more aesthetic interface settings.
And as far as the navigation issue goes, that gives me a nifty idea for a nifty javascript I want to create!
Anyway that’s my two cents.
Im just a web surfer but I agree pop-ups suck, but I hate tabs just the same. Just dont open retarded advertisements and no more than one window and it is fine for me.
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