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usability post: ETA and snap
Sep. 30th, 2007 01:27 pmI don't know if it's contagious from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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 anddeleted 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?
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
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?
