Re: Another Perspective on the Cause of the Keyhole Problem

At 09:54 PM 10/19/2003, Jill Huchital wrote:
>Absolutely. If your mindset is "make the page pretty"
>as opposed to "make the page usable", then you might
>feel you deserve a fair bit of control over its
>composition, and further that anyone who messes around
>with your design should expect to get something wacko.
>Or, if your mindset is "the window is just like a
>piece of paper", then you'll figure out how to "glue
>stuff down" on a web page, and you might think
>resizing the window is like cutting or adding margins
>to the paper.

True, but I'm hoping that the examples I give on this topic will
demonstrate to such people that their model of the world isn't accurate.

>Scott, do you get more pushback about fixed-width
>pages than about keyholed pulldowns? I'm guessing yes,
>because the former is probably the result of a
>different mental model, where the latter is just
>laziness.

My sample size is very small, so it's hard to draw conclusions.  I've
received vociferous push-back from a small number of web page designers, in
part because I failed to address the readability issues in earlier
iterations of my argument, in part because they view me as somebody who
doesn't do page layout for a living and am hence unqualified to make
comments on the topic.  On the other hand, there have also been people who
have gone out of their way to modify their page layout strategies based on
my comments.

Scott