Internet Outlook with Richard Wiggins | 30

Do Spinning Globes Yield Superior Sites?

Macromedianess: Style vs. Substance

One thing I've noticed about sites with ultra-cool graphics is they tend to have ultra-spare annotation. In fact, the first thing I thought of when I saw the Gabo menus was "These are Gopher menus!" Yes, folks, return with us to those heady days in 1992 when every menu was a short phrase, with no surrounding annotation! Hmmm, didn't we migrate away from that for a reason?

Then there's the fact that all of the content is embedded in Macromedianess. One of the original precepts of the Web was representation of text in a standard markup format so that content could be repurposed in ways never imagined by the author. IE can't offer meaningul titles in the history panel, because the Gabo site doesn't seem to supply a Title tag for its spherical excursions. I couldn't cut and paste part of the mission statement for the site into this article, because the text appears on screen as an image, not as Windows-aware text elements. A spider such as AltaVista isn't going to discover those words, either, as it crawls the site.

Another question arises: does the Gabo site really offer a superior form of navigation, or is it just a totally cool look on screen? To answer this question, we'd have to define what "superior navigation" really means. To me, that means it's more efficient for the user to find the information he or she wants. "More efficient" means it takes less time, costs fewer clicks of the mouse, requires less cogitation to get to the meat.

To others, "superior navigation" may mean that the navigational experience itself is somehow more pleasant. Traveling through this site is like driving through the Canadian Rockies; traveling through a more mundane site is like driving through the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Given the different assumptions people bring to the Web, there's no one answer as to whether Gabo has it right. But I notice that some other new sites are hewing to a minimalist school. For instance, the new rival to Switchboard, www.anywho.com, uses one simple, tiny logo, a white background, and a trivial form to present choices to users. For my purposes, it's more efficient than Switchboard, because the screen paints fast, and I can pick the kind of search I want to do in fewer mouse clicks. Even the hit list is superior, because it's longer than the measly eight items that Switchboard presents.

I suspect that if any telephone directory service required a special plugin, took a minute or more to load, and made the user sit while screen elements dance into assigned position, it would find its customer base is vanishingly small.

On the other hand, I suspect the viewers of the Disney site expect a little bit of flash, and, if Flash allows Disney to deliver some animation in a bandwidth-frugal manner, customers will be happy. It's the yin and yang of the Web - style versus substance. Which one you prefer depends on your own personality - and maybe on your mood. Even circumstance may dictate your preferences; when you're desperate for that pizza, you don't want to waste time watching the Domino's logo rotate in 3-space.

Check Gabo out, and drop me a line. Meanwhile, I'm going to ask my pal Sue what she thinks of it.

Footnote

One correspondent pointed out that Gabo worked fine under a PC setup similar to mine. Not to worry, I did manage to get Gabo to dance on my PC under Netscape after I wrote this article last week. Sometimes it's frustrating when browsers and plugins suffer from bit rot, but after enough fresh installs and reboots, things usually get better.