Overquo
Today I took a second look at the Safari RSS preview on apple.com and realized how we failed to stop the web from invading the rest of computing. The first reaction is one of horror—after all, we sometimes have to remind people how to drag & drop these days. On the other hand, it does mean that we all have a certain understanding of basic computing elements, and it’s why Jakob’s alertbox on links should always be considered during a design—underlined links are powerful metaphors now.
The invasion hit full-steam with Web View in Windows 98, and web elements spun off that in subtler ways, such as one-click browsing in columns view in the OS X Finder. Safari RSS’s interface is just another sign of the web’s victory: sure, it’s a browser application, but it’s presenting sortable data with a rather DHTML-like page metaphor instead of something more tabular (like the bookmark interface Safari already uses) or email-like. The commands for sorting and excerpt length are in a sidebar, for heaven’s sake.
But the real victor is our friend Raquo. Once just a French right-quote character, it’s been elevated into a common navigational element. In fact, many of my applications use it now—here’s a review of bookmark bar treatments—and it’s even been elevated into system-wide components such as overflow menus, and in toggles like Windows XP’s status bar. Raquo has essentially become the “More…” character, not because it expresses that concept the best, but simply because web designers used it. After all, it is a common HTML entity.
Going back to the browsers for a bit, do we really prefer overflow menus more than the other treatments? Well, I personally vote for Camino and OmniWeb’s approach, since bookmark bars are about immediate access to a handful of favorites. You can’t control when people abuse a computing metaphor, but you should avoid penalizing functionality when it happens. Camino/OmniWeb handles this growing the bookmark bar’s size as there are more links. Users are encouraged to trim down the list through their desire to reclaim space usable for web pages. Safari/Firefox/IE on the other hand use the overflow menu concept, and force an additional click to display the extra items—they become less usable because they are no longer active interface elements, but they are still legible and accessible. Opera, however, simply keeps truncating their labels until you can’t recognize them anymore, and also shrinks other controls on the bar, like search fields, to the point of uselessness.
Like Raquo, overflow is a useful, but imperfect solution. But it’s here to stay. Viva la web!
