This is such an interesting thread.
Whitney Quesenbery wrote
I've never understood why sites are so self-important that they must
treat other sites as foreign bodies. If you don't want me to follow a
link, why did you put it there? Why are you making people learn your
particular convention for "this link does something unexpected"?
I've even seen this behavior between different sections of corporate
intranets, as though the XXX Department is in a completely different
world. I watched while one user opened no less than 12 windows while
trying to complete a single, relatively straight-forward task, but one
which meant he needed to gather information from several sources.
I'm not defending this practice, but I think I do understand it. It all
depends on what kind of site you're talking about.
I haven't seen much discussion of content in this thread, but let's
take, for example, an e-commerce site. Perhaps there are business or
marketing concerns that end up affecting the site design. Say, for
example, it's a travel agency we're talking about. The user has done a
search for possible vacations and has an array of options that link to
external vendors. Those vendors have multiple ads, some of which may be
competing travel agencies. Or the user may choose to make a purchase
directly from the vendor.
If the IA people present a design with a single window, the
marketing/business people might think: the customers will end up making
their purchases from another source. Whereas if the original window
stays open, we'll remain visible and in the forefront of the customer's
mind, thus more likely to be the point of purchase.
(Uh oh! this is reminding me of the thread about the "purity" of site
design! No, I don't mean designers should be thinking in these terms
when they design--I mean they should want to keep their jobs.)
It's similar with those big corporate websites. The divisions are
staking out their identities at the expense of the site design. I'm
relatively certain that the people responsible for the design of those
sites were making compromises from political pressure--not designing out
of conviction that they were doing what's best for the user.
But this raises an important point, related to what Jens said here:
And still it's hypertext. Understanding the Web as a whole there is no
concept like an "external site", so there might be no point in marking
links as "external", especially when current document/sites fails in
helping the user.
Was it on this list or somewhere else that someone referenced J.J.
Garrett? Conceptually speaking, the hypertext model absolutely does
reflect the foundations and ideals underlying the web--but imho it
doesn't reflect the direction in which the industry is heading. As the
web becomes increasingly commercial and its front and back-end
technologies develop, we're designing software more than hypertext. Of
course, it depends on who we are (academics? consultants? coders?
information architects?), where we work, and what kind of sites we produce.
I think I've said enough for one morning.
Elena
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