"Simetrical" <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com>
wrote in message
news:7c2a12e20707021637w3f10a167u85fa5ab624bd58fc@mail.gmail.com...
On 7/2/07, Phil Boswell
<phil.boswell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Hence my suggestion to include the full textual
message within the
"title"
attribute,
which would appear as a tooltip.
Which will only appear if people actually hover over it, rather than
anytime they happen to glance in that direction.
Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, unless someone provides good evidence
that there's a concrete advantage to this, I'm going with my hunches
and not personally implementing icons, although if specific wikis
would like to they should be (and are) able to.
By your argument, icons are always bad!
Icons are necessarily at least _slightly_ less clear than text. It is not
particularly intuitive that a picture of a house means go back to the
starting page, but it has become recognised as such through consistent use
between many browsers and websites. A standardised 'edit' button would do
the same. If you read the discussion about UniversalWikiEditButton you
would see the advice that for a period of adoption, the icon and text are
displayed together so that users can become familiar with the link, and that
once it has been widely adopted, the text could then be removed.
The problem with just text as a link, is that it can easily get lost amongst
a page that is already predominantly text with links. Particularly if it
gets moved to the left-hand side, so it is more embedded in the text.
Your 'hunch' goes against pretty much every UI study ever :-)
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)