I would have thought "reply" shouldn't add attachment by default. Attachment should be retained only when you forward the mail. Outlook 2000, Opera and Mozilla Thunderbird handles this properly. Apparently, there are not so sensible software is out there :-)

One of the most common tasks computer users face is repetition -- performing the same task more than once. Computers are fairly good at this. So why do people spend so much time repeating tasks by hand? Often the interfaces they use are resistant to automation, and other interfaces are obscure or unavailable.

Molly has interesting links to make PowerPoint presentations accessible, with some limitations. But what I really liked is the way she explains her thoughts. Nothing religious about it.

I've been making these changes to my templates every day - some of them where already done. Now, presenting the main content first is a tough one for me. I need to move the navigation bar from top to bottom, then fix all the style sheets and then rebuild. I should've moved to a SSI based template. I'm defering this for the future.

If your page is specifically for a web form, then this kind of automatic focussing makes sense. Even then, if your first field is a select list don't put auto-focus on it. People might try to scroll down, but what will happen is that some thing else in the select list will get selected, without user noticing it.

I found three who don't open up links in new windows
- Dawn at Life Uncommon
- Christine at Blah Blah Blog
- Laurie Mueller a.k.a Minnesota Gardener

All these sites are very well designed. None of them leaves any doubt as to why ladies make the best visual design.

I totally agree with all her points.

Personally, I'd like to add to this one - "Don't Respond Immediately". Responding immediately can really cause your client going back and forth on brilliant ideas and you going back and forth to your version control tool. Additionally, if you work in a team where others are not enthusiastic about getting things done quickly, that can result in a very unrewarding workplace experience.

Sadly, very much true when it comes to developing web applications. Not a single soul to give ideas on how the interface should look before you make it, but every one with lot of whining on how what you made doesn't fit with their mental picture of it and tons of "creative" ideas soon after. It is only with the web really - I've made Oracle applications with Oracle Forms and people were pretty happy always and straight away use it. The moment it is on the web, they want to put spinning cell phones here, purple and gold color there...

Another consistent source of annoyance is the group that does only "thinking" - motto, "we think, you do". They usually have architect or analyst or expert tagged somewhere in their title. Skills in implementation or estimating implementation is usually limited to "oh, we spent 4 months to make this 200 page Word document and a 20 slide Power Point presentation (with animations!). Since the whole project is for 4 months, you now can go ahead and do the implementation in 1 or 2 days. By the way, we'll have some changes tomorrow too". The saddest part is that quite a few managers don't understand that the final requirement is a system, not documents and presentations. Perhaps that is why we live in a world of vaporware and tupperware software.

Webtrends Live has a login page that suffers from a tab order issue. It is username - Go button - password instead of username - password - Go button. I wrote to them, but they claim it must be browser bugs. I use Opera and Mozilla, on Windows on Linux. I suppose it must work with IE. The source code of the page seems to indicate that the tab order is set correctly.

Here's why:

- Perhaps you are not aware of it, but there are people with smaller monitors and large resolution. Your carefully designed window with fixed fonts etc goes for a toss in these environments. You are positively evil if you turn off scrollbars in your pages too.
- My version of IE 5.5 at home is what I got from AT&T. It has a bug in that any popup window's content will time out. I need to stop it, then hit refresh in the window to see it. Thanks to you, menu bar is hidden in the popup, so I need to hit CTRL-R to refresh. No thank you, I'll hit close button instead.
- Most of the time I use Opera or Mozilla, in Linux. Both these browsers support tabbed windows interface and I love it. Browsing your site is not the only thing I'm doing all the time. I've other applications open. When your window pops up, it adds that much clutter to my task bar. If I want to open in a new window, I'll right click and do so.
- Most of the time, I simply close a popped up window or a link opening in a new window before it even fills up with content. I've observed this among other users too.
- Oh, my proxy server also kills these things considering them to be advertisements.

Still not convinced? Read top 10 mistakes of web design and grow up. A site you make is for others to see and not for you to salivate over.

"Just because you know Javascript doesn't mean that you need to put it everywhere you can. Good design is not in deciding what to use, but most of the time what not to use."

Then go and educate your marketing bosses or graphic artists about the fact that web is a new medium. Ask them how would they like it if while reading a magazine a page just jumped right at their face again and again.