Small text links like numbers or short verbs may serve an interface well but make for tiny mouse targets. While working on a new 37signals service (codename: Misto), we found that adding some CSS-based padding helps people activate the target 4px sooner than expected.
Great tip! I hate when trying to hit small numbers as links, say when clicking through pages of products on e-commerce sites. Hope Nordstrom adds this on their shoe listings...
Hmmm... yeah, I've been doing this for a while on our intranet.
However, I can't help feeling that unless the link looks easier to hit before you get there, the user will still put extra effort into controlling the mouse more precisely. Even though there is a benefit to the padded hit area -- as I say, I do it myself -- I'm not sure there's as much benefit as you'd hope for.
HAHA ... *I* know what it is! Jason told me back when I was guest poster.
My lips are sealed. Hurry, though!
Or, more simply, make interface elements that do something easy to click on.
Misto... hmm.
I'm going to take some guesses on what this could be, anyone else have ideas, tack 'em on!
Ofcourse I'm basing this on that "example" that they gave, so I might be completely off!
If I had my choice of Mike's guesses, I'd love to see a 37 CMS for small websites. With an inexpensive commercial license.
Another little idea:
If you have a verticle list of links like so many people do, setting the link as display:block and giving it a width of 100% makes it so that not just the text gets activated on :hover but the whole width of the list element. (I believe that this is how it was described in the ALA article - "taming lists")
However, I can't help feeling that unless the link looks easier to hit before you get there, the user will still put extra effort into controlling the mouse more precisely.
Maybe so, but I've been to sites that don't apply what I described above and others that do, and it's just enough so that you notice a difference.
Oh, and IE (6 for sure) comes with a bug. If you have background color of the link set to transparent, again only the text reacts to :hover. Give it a background color and it works (and keeps those warnings from the validator at bay too).
"If I had my choice of Mike's guesses, I'd love to see a 37 CMS for small websites. With an inexpensive commercial license."
We'll throw our hat into that ring too.
I'd love to see a 37 CMS for small websites.
No comment other than this: Aren't there enough small CMS tools already?
"A usable CMS for small-scale websites"
(sadly) - perhaps a niche market product?
We're pulling apart and putting together something (not a CMS) right now, trying to work in usability and accessibility. It's a great piece of code (programming), but the writers seemed to confuse the paragraph tag with the table tag, amongst other things. (Maybe they should but into the 'be good at one thing theory?')
(Not trying to be snooty here - we're not wiley veterans and our xhtml/css may leave somthing to be desired as well)
Anyway, just found a nice site that apparently has 40 live CMS's for testing (thanks Sitepoint!). Maybe that will make it a bit easier to find something acceptable.
I don't understand this tip. Adding padding increases the clickable area, but it also makes it look like there's an extra space on each side of the link. Are you supposed to remove the actual spaces around the link? But then there won't be any space in text browsers or in Netscape 4 (which you have to hide this rule from because it barfs if you give a link padding without also giving it display:block).
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Reggards
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This topic is one we will tackle later in this article, but it refers to making sure that your application and the dock aren't fighting it out for supremacy of the screen.
At WWDC, I listened to Apple representatives make some excellent points about taking the time to build a 100%-compliant Aqua application, and I think all developers need to look beyond the code and listen to what the folks at Apple have to say
bocigalingus must be something funny.
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