Blackmoor Vituperative

An archive of 75+ inspirational messages from Despair, Inc., courtesy of TechRepublic.

The US Department of Homeland Security has warned that attackers are exploiting an unpatched flaw in Windows to compromise systems via malicious websites.

Microsoft on Friday said it was investigating reports of a newly discovered, unpatched bug in the XMLHTTP 4.0 ActiveX control, which it confirmed was being exploited on malicious sites. The bug has the potential to infect a large number of systems. Since it doesn’t require any user interaction, a user must merely use Internet Explorer to visit a site containing the exploit.

(from TechWorld, Windows hit by zero-day flaw)

Does a house have to fall on you people for you to get the message?

1. Don’t use Internet Explorer!
2. Don’t use or enable ActiveX!

While discussing blogs this afternoon with a colleague, we had a brief discussion on the topic of forcing a hyperlink to open in a new browser window (typically with the target=”_blank” tag). I took the position that most professional web developers take: it’s nearly always a bad idea to wrest control away from the user. My colleague took the position that most people in advertising take: the less control the user has, the better.

The passage below is by Jakob Nielsen, widely acknowledged as the world’s leading expert on user-friendly web design, from his list of the ten very worst web design mistakes of all time. I am not quoting him because I think his opinion is infallible (there are one or two areas where Nielsen and I differ, if only in the details). I am quoting him because experience has taught me that he is very good at explaining why a web design mistake is, in fact, a mistake.

Opening up new browser windows is like a vacuum cleaner sales person who starts a visit by emptying an ash tray on the customer’s carpet. Don’t pollute my screen with any more windows, thanks (particularly since current operating systems have miserable window management).

Designers open new browser windows on the theory that it keeps users on their site. But even disregarding the user-hostile message implied in taking over the user’s machine, the strategy is self-defeating since it disables the Back button which is the normal way users return to previous sites. Users often don’t notice that a new window has opened, especially if they are using a small monitor where the windows are maximized to fill up the screen. So a user who tries to return to the origin will be confused by a grayed out Back button.

Links that don’t behave as expected undermine users’ understanding of their own system. A link should be a simple hypertext reference that replaces the current page with new content. Users hate unwarranted pop-up windows. When they want the destination to appear in a new page, they can use their browser’s “open in new window” command — assuming, of course, that the link is not a piece of code that interferes with the browser’s standard behavior.

With respect to blogs, specifically, I think it is worth pointing out that the best blogs — and, more importantly for my colleague’s purposes, the blogs that get linked to the most — almost never force users to open new windows when they click a link. Visit Technorati.com and check out the top 100 blogs. Go through them all and see how many force users to open links in new windows. I guarantee you that the top 10 English speaking blogs do not.