gilgongo

RSS was all the rage back in about 2005. About time we tried again after failing to get it to work first time.

The OP is referring to "visited links", not the style of the unfollowed links.

Not having a followed link style in this context degrades the usability of the website because you have to rely on your memory of which links you have followed on the list and which you have yet to see. This is an important and little remembered point in the current interaction design "dark age", as Bruce Tognazzini puts it, and Norman et. al. <a href="https://www.fastcodesign.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-des... recently written about</a>.

(It is of course also true that the unfollowed link style is not very clear)

While the idea of government intervention in the free market is classically dismissed by right-wing politics, the reality of the past 40 years has been heavy intervention by US and many other Western governments.

However, unlike the forms of left-wing intervention that free-market thinkers decry, this intervention takes the form of tax breaks, bail-outs and guarantees against market failures by governments to industries and individual corporations. This has produced what's been called "socialism for the rich" in many countries, where financial institutions are free to act without fear of any consequence of negative repercussions. Just as steel mills were in Soviet Russia, or rice farmers in Mao's China.

Witness this week's apparent bailout guarantee by the UK government to Nissan, the TTIP, or the way the Japanese government behaved towards its financial sector in the 1990's.

Interesting how the use of woodwork and things like shiplap was so prevalent. Walking around these places today, you are surrounded by stone, concrete and glass. Such an extremely different experience.

I'm fine with this because all the data is encrypted until representatives from all three branches of government agree to unlock it (and even then it only decrypts the last 7 days).

Oh, wait.

A very small number of people may intentionally sit down to design systems that purposefully trick users into doing things they don't want to do. However, to lump that in as he does with a load of other things that are basically not being done from choice is silly. Yes, they are not 100% good things, but they are not actively malicious either. Intent. Culpability..

How does Harry Brignull get his dark patterns site covered so regularly? About once a year for the past decade, somebody does an article about it. Weird.

Anyway. I'm a designer and my work has even featured on his site (after he did some freelancing with us - cheeky begger). His implication that people like me sit around trying to making life harder for customers is complete bollocks. We don't. Businesses just don't. It's bad business and nobody would willing do it.

Usually (and I grant their might be a tiny number of exceptions) they have to do things crappily because of constraints beyond their control. It may seem malicious to the likes of a freelance design-and-run merchant like Brignull, but it's not. It can also just be clueless visual designers wanting to make things pretty at the expense of being usable. But mostly it's just hidden constraints.

But hey who cares. It's good rant material.

On the evidence of this article, the author needs to read up on basic HCI principles in UI design, in particular the concept of mode error and issues relating to colour blindness.

The proposed designs offer poor usability for a number of reasons and I sincerely hope it doesn't get implemented for anything important.

If your examples are Google or Amazon, then those have profits several orders of magnitude bigger than the likes of NYT.

Their traffic is too high for them to afford it (and probably wouldn't outweigh the SEO uplift)

MailOnline. SSL would just cost too much in Akamai billing. Otherwise they'd do it straight away for the SEO uplift.

They enabled Secure HTTP don't forget. Not the insecure kind a lot of people might be thinking about here.

The only people who don't notify software developers of exploits they find in their systems are criminals. That the FBI are happy to act like black hat hackers in this is pretty amazing.

Hardly unexpected, but sad none the less. Interesting how they wonder whether a pure online edition will be able to support the same number of journalists. Were it not for the assumption that online ad revenues are busting in the same way as print sales, the platform should have no relevance to that. What a time to be ad funded as iOS9 comes out, for example...