Saved from your own errors
The Alertbox catches a spelling error in its URL and fixes it for you. This is a good trend.
Try looking at http://www.useit.com/alterbox/. It takes you straight to Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox. This is rather neat. I like this sort of thing. How common this error is can be seen by the fact that I’ve typed the above URL into this post three times and spelled it “alTERbox” two of those three. But the key thing is that it just happened. If I hadn’t noticed my misspelling in between hitting ENTER and the browser displaying the page (and changing the URL), I wouldn’t have even noticed. This kind of clever touch does wonders for a site’s usability. Google does it too: try http://ww.google.com/.
Now, the examples I’ve got there are no great surprise — the Google team have done wonders on the usability of their site (to the point of leading trends rather than following them), and it partially explains why they’re the leading search engine. And if Our Lord of Web Usability Jakob is not using usability finesses, what hope the rest of us? But I’d liek to see more of this sort of thing.
This site already makes some overtures in this direction. At one point, all the pages on here were suffixed .html, then they became .shtml, and then .cas, as the content of the pages became more sophisticated. However, the site does redirect accesses to foo.html and foo.shtml to foo.cas, so as not to break old links. Now, the filenames in the URL don’t need to be accessed with the suffix at all — if you want index.cas, you can simply call it “index”. This is made possible by Apache’s snazzy content negotiation feature, a secret code word for “if I’m asked for a file and no extension is specified, get the file with that basename and an extension.” As I understand it, if you’ve got foo.html and foo.jpg, and you ask for foo, then Apache does some weird negotiation thing to work out what to get — I don’t trust this sort of guesswork trick, so all my files have unique names. Besides, the W3C wants us to do this, and I think it’s a good idea.
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