Gnodal Journal

In the first entry of my LiveJournal, I commented rather rudely on the default link colours. Well, actually, what I wrote was “*heaves sigh / groan* Gawd this page is ugly. pink as the default colour for clicked links? How does that harmonize? *sigh*”
Someone named evan responded, commenting rather cryptically: “#8 (and later, #8 still).” (I’ve unpacked the links below.)
Here’s my reply:

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Ya, thanks evan … I think Nielsen’s comments are very sane. Also, I think they are quite usually observed. But in any case, this can’t hurt … Read and heed:

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox for May 1996: Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design
8. Non-Standard Link Colors – Links to pages that have not been seen by the user are blue; links to previously seen pages are purple or red. Don’t mess with these colors since the ability to understand what links have been followed is one of the few navigational aides that is standard in most web browsers. Consistency is key to teaching users what the link colors mean.

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, May 2, 1999: “Top Ten Mistakes” Revisited Three Years Later
8. Non-Standard Link Colors – Continues to be a problem since users rely on the link colors to understand what parts of the site they have visited. I often see users bounce repeatedly among a small set of pages, not knowing that they are going back to the same page again and again. (Also, because non-standard link colors are unpleasantly frequent, users are now getting confused by any underlining of text that is not a link. Score: Severe

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Cudna said it better myself. Actually, in retrospect, the pink was one of the things that moved me to swing this page in direction of a personal diary. Which, BTW, I happen to think is just fine.

Bookmarklets
With “The power of JavaScript in the hands of the user!“, Jesse’s Bookmarklets Page kicks off a lovely introduction:

Bookmarklets are extra browser features that you can store as bookmarks on your personal toolbar. For example, if you have search links on your personal toolbar, you can go to Slashdot and then click the toolbar button to search the links on Slashdot. Bookmarklets are actually short JavaScript programs that, when stored as bookmarks, act on whatever page you’re viewing before you trigger them.

A good example of b’lets’ power *yaaa, that’s right, b’lets. I just now used this neologism; did I coin it?* is “test styles” on Jess’s Web Development Bookmarklets page. This makes reference to “Blast Sites with User CSS Sheets“, a “meryl.net article”“, which begins:

All you need is a modern browser [standards compliant, ehh whot? h_b] and a text editor to make use of a powerful tool that will make you wonder why you never thought of [this] before.
Creating your own user style sheets gives you the ability to: find legacy markup; understand how a Web site is laid out; ensure the site is accessible for people with disabilities; conduct fast usability testing

Bookmarklets – free tools for power surfing is another page that looks pretty kewl … “Bookmarklets allow you to: modify the way you see someone else’s webpage; extract data from a webpage; search more quickly, and in ways not possible with a search engine; navigate in new ways …and more. Over 150 bookmarklets are available.” Yup … kewl.
And just this morning a friend pointed me toward Bookmarklets: Search Engine Bookmarklets – www.docjavascript.com, a nice double-handful of b’lets dedicated to that task. *Did I just coin a new term? 20:43AST 10JAN03 hfx_ben* nota: I’m not sure why docjavascript.com appears in this last item’s title.

On this day googling “bookmarklet” returned 34,700 results. Consider yourself duly informed.