Yes, Microsoft had one of those "helpful" features. I remember
spending a substantial amount of time trying to turn those off or at
least reduce the number of times they appeared. I think there are many
people who don't want to be "helped" in this fashion. So, if you add
some feature like Answer Tips, it should not be automatic and should be
under the user's control.
On a related kind of subject, I just learned yesterday that there's an
add-on to IE7 (which I have to use for some other reasons) that will
stop Flash ads and videos from playing when I go to a web site. It's
apparently a toggle, so you can have it on if you like but can skip all
those things if you don't want to see them.
Brenda Clark
Potland OR
-----Original Message-----
From: Kyle Banerjee <kyle.banerjee_at_GMAIL.COM>
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Sent: Tue, 8 Apr 2008 9:41 am
Subject: Re: NGC4LIB Digest - 4 Apr 2008 to 7 Apr 2008 (#2008-72)
I can't remember the M$ lingo, but didn't they enable "smart tags" in
Office documents a few years back that did something along these same
lines? The concept may have been solid, but finding people who
actually like them is hard.
Another thing to watch out for is that excessive links to other
information can make things harder to use and screw up navigation.
When the web first came out, a lot of people talked about how great it
was because every word in a document could be a hyperlink. In
practice, this is a bad idea. Answer Tips aren't nearly as bad because
they don't direct people away from their contexts, but it would be
interesting to get some user response on this.
kyle
Received on Tue Apr 08 2008 - 11:59:09 EDT