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While getting prepped for an upcoming conference, I did a quickie google search on flash+usability, looking for a […]

While getting prepped for an upcoming conference, I did a quickie google search on flash+usability, looking for a wonderful article on fitts law on flash I’d found before. Look at the first result




is this how you’d like your page to be displayed on google and yahoo? Time for frame users to go out and rewrite their noframes messages…. What’s sad is if you do follow the link, it’s fine (assuming you have a frames-enabled browser, as most of the browsing population has) so the link only appears to be useless.

6 Comments

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  1. 1
    victor

    Wouldn’t it be nice if web browsers had a ‘bot simulation mode’ we (web designers) could could see what they see? I guess we could just use Lynx…

  2. 2
    victor

    ugh. so i go to download MacLynx for this very reason, and the description reads, ‘Frames, forms, cookies, proxies, and more are all supported…’ But I don’t want support! I want 1992!

  4. 4
    ralph

    At least on the copy of MacLynx I have, “support for frames” means that when you look at a frameset page, you get links to the component pages, not that Lynx attempts to display the frameset as if you were viewing it in IE or Netscape. It also displays the NOFRAMES text. So you get 1994, but you don’t get trapped there. This is also true for the UNIX version of Lynx.

    If you want 1992, you’ll need to download a copy of the CERN line mode client. The Mac version of that is at http://browsers.evolt.org/index.cfm/dir/macwww/1.03/ .

  5. 5
    surfmoc

    realize this:

    google’s automated bots often referred to as spiders view the web through the eyes of netscape 1 capable browsers… hence the frame message…

    The link displayed within google’s search results is the original page… there is no way to correct this… google and many other search engines do not follow redirects…

    However, macromedia should have client and server side redirects so that if the user does follow the link they will eventually be driven to the correct version…

    The bigger issue here is not the irrelevant frame capable browser warning… Its the lack of meta tags to convey to the user and the search engine what the site and page are about.

  6. 6
    christina

    But will the user follow the link? Isn’t it important to write a user friendly no-frames message to avoid this sort of trouble?

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