usability post: ETA and snap

[metawidget]

I don't know if it's contagious from diatribein here (friends-only, alas), but I've been thinking abbreviations for a little while.

It took me quite a while to figure out what ETA stood for in a forum/blog/journal context: it was always clear from context that it meant "updated content," but the interference with "estimated time of arrival" in my head made it hard to come up with "edited to add." This kind of bothers me: unless it's ironic, or a statement of some sort, using an already firmly occupied bit of namespace to mean something very different seems like a Bad Idea. As far as I can tell, ETA fails that test.

The other thing about ETA is that there is perfectly good markup to represent the idea: XHTML has a pair of tags, <ins> and <del> that work fine in LiveJournal and are way less confusing. Added and deleted stuff can even be annotated given a title attribute, if you have a relatively compliant browser it'll appear as a tool tip or in some other useful way.

If markup isn't available where you write or if you're not a markup geek, you may as well just put EDIT: or UPDATE:, more readers will decipher your post faster and it's only an extra keystroke or three.

In other Internetty thoughts, LiveJournal has let folks enable little hover previews like I've seen on some other blog services (WordPress, I think?) for some of their links, like truth, over there (the rule seems to be inside *.livejournal.com, the previews don't happen, which I think is a bit of a shame as it'd be nice to see a little flash of someone's journal layout in a link to it). So far, I find the icons a little bothersome but the previews themselves I can see myself using. I'll see if I'm using them in a week and decide whether I like them. Anyone else have any thoughts on that feature?

Comments

[silverspar.livejournal.com]

I HATE SNAP WITH THE FIRE OF A THOUSAND SUNS.

[metawidget]

Excellent use of that icon ;)

[silverspar.livejournal.com]

Yes. Snoop and Kirby in the house ... being all hell naw. ;P

The fact that I have to download a cookie (http://real.snap.com/about/shots_faq.php?disable_spa=1) or get a different adblocker so I don't have to see the Snap previews irritates me.

[metawidget]

I dunno, I think the cookie solution is good engineering and pretty respectful of your wishes — it's pretty consistent with the robots.txt opt-out approach.

[cjmr.livejournal.com]

ugh. Snap eats bandwidth like crazy. Which isn't a problem unless all three of us are using the internet at once. But since my son mostly uses the internet for Google Earth, we don't have much bandwidth to spare when he's online.

[phrawzty.livejournal.com]

Just out of curiousity, do not have broadband access due to a technical limitation in your area of residence, or other reasons? I ask only because i've been reading quite a lot lately about broadband coverage in different parts of the world (work-related), and it strikes me that high-speed Internet access is not particularly prevalent in the U.S.A. (as compared with other modernised countries).

[cjmr.livejournal.com]

Yes, we do have broadband. I can't even imagine trying to look at Google Earth without broadband. But we do have the cheapest speed of broadband from our provider and we're also working over a household wireless network that slows things down a bit more.

[metawidget]

Just as a couple more data points, my parents are a little far from town (Ormstown, QC) for broadband (about 7km), and one of my profs has a cottage in upstate NY and is out of range there, too.

[blueheron.livejournal.com]

Everyone knows that ETA stands for eicosatetraenoic acid, η, the Burakumin (in Japan), the Electronic Technician's Association, the Electronic Travel Authority (in Australia), Employment and Training Administration (in the US), the Environmental Transport Association (in the UK) and I am sure others.

Estimated time of arrival is just a small part that shares that name space. I never really thought of it in a context outside of train and plane schedules.

And yes, I use "ETA:" or "Edit:" all the time in my blog. Markup is rarely appropriate for something that you tack on at the end, IMHO.

"Edited to add" as one of the meanings is also listed in the wikipedia article on ETA. ;)