Not sure what that pic is meant to demonstrate. Do you want to be able to click the whole page? There are some blue links there, but if there are other places to click, the design should really make that clear. It hate touching the screen to find I’m being taken somewhere I didn’t want to go.
The whole links within links things sounds like the ultimate web disaster to me.
I don’t use a mobile or a touchy-screen-thingie, which is probably why I don’t know how you’re supposed to scroll on those things without hitting a link.
I do know that since I’ve gotten machines that upgraded to Unity, my habit of clicking on the white space to the left of page content in order to give myself page focus so I can arrow up/down the page has now suddenly started activating crap I don’t intend hiding in the sidebar which pops up whenever my mouse or worse, trackpad, gets close.
Honestly who thought putting a menu at the left was a good idea?? Zomg. And I heard even though I’m using desktops, they insisted it was a Good Thing to make me work with what is supposed to be a touch/tablet interface.
I hope actual touch/tablet interfaces suck so much less. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be on desktop. And so anyways, how would I scroll a page without clicking some link?
Every red area is a link. I don’t want the whole page to be clickable, but each block of related content should take you to somewhere you expect. I find it intuitive and obvious. There’s no links within links, the blue text is just there to prompt action, which it does. Mashing anywhere in the cell will take you where you want to go.
And so anyways, how would I scroll a page without clicking some link?
All touch devices detect scrolling and don’t follow links. Only when you tap without moving does it follow a link.
If every red area is a link - extremely worrying regarding content - then (looking at the image) most of it can be already achieved with an inline hyperlink. In either case small screen mobile device are too narrowly focused for user-agents. It would be the purpose of CSS, Scripts or the OS to create larger targets. Else it’s looking more like or they should have adopted the XHTML 2 approach.
Markup should be mainly device independent, visual rendering is a very different topic.
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You’ve obviously never tried using my not-terrible-smart-phone, then. 
Touch the screen to start or continue scrolling, and if it’s anywhere near a link, the blasted thing interprets that as a tap. The idea of whole clickable chunks rather than just the odd word fills me with dread - and would stop me even attempting to use such a site on my phone.[/ot]
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That’s not altogether true. If you touch and scroll as you would you do not follow the link. You actually have to tap and release. At least on iOS. In other words it measures intent.
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Yes, it is. 
Exactly - you haven’t tried doing this on my phone, which is not iOS.
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I actually didn’t know this.
[ot]TechnoBear I am QUITE disappointed in you… you are so obviously one of the few left in the world not using iOS!!!
See, you’re the problem, not the web site. You’re obviously using some ancient technology, like an Atari or something. Or a Nokia. Or an HTC. And you’re obnoxious to expect our state of the art internets to work on something older than my grandma. Or HTML5. Or pre Mayan apocalypse.
You know, we web developers simply can’t keep coding for the lowest common denominator: clumsy people with fat fingers using ancient non-iOS devices. This would be like coding for Netscape 7 or IE6. If we tried to code for the likes of you, our codebase would be ginormous, up-to-date internets users would be getting a second-rate experience, and you’d never upgrade. A few hundred pounds for a new phone because it doesn’t act like the (clearly superiour) iOS phones should either be within your grasp budget-wise, or you really shouldn’t be trying to use the internet with it (in psychology, we call this “acceptance”. It was common when the iPhone first came out, before everyone finally got one). You know the internet wasn’t created for crappy old phones. It was created for phones that don’t suck-- iOS phones. Not only do they look sleek and weigh nothing and do pretty much everything for you, but they offer you a seamless internets experience by not sucking the way all other types of phones do. Touch is not only a superiour human-machine interface, but also an interface that Apple has pretty much perfected, like the smooth face of the sweetest Goddess of eternal youth. thank you jobs
Honestly, when I was at the Fronteers conference last October, one of the speakers asked the ~500 attendees (most or all of whom were web developers) “who here has an iPhone?” and I believe almost every hand was up in the air. There was one guy with some Windows phone but I think he was just trying to be a hipster. He was wearing a fedora and had strange facial hair fer sure. What web developers use as phones is pretty much what the rest of the world uses as phones too. These are not two separate demographics. iOS phones are the most popular in the world. Everyone uses them, except Somalians and South-East Asians, and they don’t count and they use crappy phones running crappy browses like Opera. You are not Somalian and don’t have this excuse.
So the solution to this problem (which, again, is caused by YOU and not the web site), is to either buy an iOS device right now, or stop trying to use the internets with such a broken touch-interface on an old device and then coming onto our developer forums to whinge and complain about it.
Next thing you know, you’ll be wanting to play Crysis on a Win95 machine. Or using the internet to bank with. Or write posts on forums.[/ot]
The only difference between the XHTML 2 approach and the (X)HTML 5 approach is that the latter uses two tags around content instead of one - one to identify what the content is and the second to apply the link.
Either could be as easily implemented as they work identically.
A really simple JavaScript to convert XHTML 2 style links to XHTML 5 style links would read:
var tags = document.getElementsByTagName('*');
for (var i = tags.length - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
if ('A' !== tags[i].nodeName && '' !== tags[i].href) {
tags[i].innerHTML = '<a href="'tags[i].href+'">'+tags[i].innerHTML+'</a>';
tags[i].href = '';
}
}
Of course if it were really being done on XHTML then you’d probably need to use DOM commands rather than innerHTML but the above code illustrates just how little difference there is between the two.
Whice device?
I realise this is a joke, but the touch era is well and truly upon us now, adopt progress or your own demise.
It’s more a rant against monoculture and also something I’ve noticed kinda regularly recently… where web developers see the technology they use, and the way they use it, as somehow representative of the majority of their own users (unless, of course, your audience IS developers). Current job keeps sending designs for websites clearly made on those ginormous cine-Mac screens, you know, the 33" things nobody’s mom has, but pretty much EVERY design bureau does have. Complete with scrollbars on every device I use.
It’s one of the first rules of usability: you are not the audience. But usability is somewhere in the bottom-rung of all the things any general web developer has to keep in mind when they build stuff, I know.
Along with understanding there ARE and will continue to be a variety of devices people use to access teh interwebs, we need to understand that how a top-of-the-line product works with our sites is not how 99% of the rest of the devices do, and if General Population is our audience, we need to just… keep those in mind. But for me, this always slides into accessibility… chin cup surfing and all that. Would be nice if those were in many devs minds when they build stuff, but not something I expect, and I may have accepted that (won’t stop me from rants, but that’s maybe because rants are fun. Plus an outlet for frustration when I have to build broken stuff too. Oh well, pays the mortgage…).
As for touch, I would love to see it evolve to true haptic wonderland… bouncing, resisting, changing texture. I’m not sure if this really needs a whole revolution in materials science or not, but when it comes, it will be awesome.
For me, using touch is like any non-computering senior using a mouse. It’s slow, clumsy, difficult. Something I would have to invest quite a bit of money and time into. But, I’m not saying I won’t.
Ahh, I pretty much assumed most smart phones were equal to iphone by now. Another reason I’m afraid to switch. I love the screen sizes of the samsong galexes and others in comparison to the iphone 5. But I’m afraid of loosing little things like this that I have become used to.
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It’s a Vodafone something-or-other, about 18 months old, with a fold-out QWERTY keyboard and using Opera Mini. The only reason I got it was so that I can test my sites to see that they’re usable on mobile. If they work on my low-end phone, then they should be OK on anything. I do also use it occasionally when we’re travelling, to get updates on the ferry services and road closures. (We always seem to manage to travel when there’s a gale/storm/hurricane. )
I do hope you’re not suggesting everybody should use touch-screen? If I struggle, I hate to think what the experience would be like for somebody with Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy or anything else that affects motor control. 
+1
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[FONT=Verdana][ot]Thanks, @Stomme_poes, for reassuring me I’m not alone, whilst giving me a good laugh.
A few years ago, the Queen and various members of the Royal Family embarked on a holiday cruise from here. Naturally, we were inundated with journalists and reporters covering the event. They all came with their laptops, fancy phones and other devices - and I had great fun watching them all discover the realities of life. Only one mobile network with decent coverage, so if you’re with another one - forget it. (I think we now have a second one that more-or-less works.) When you do get a signal - don’t move. There are dead spots all over the village and you can lose the signal at any moment. (In one of the neighbouring villages, the only way to get a signal is to stand right on the end of the pier.) Mobile internet? Forget it. It’s improved since then, but still rated as “slow”:
On a 3G phone You can expect to be able to use email and internet on your 3G phone, indoors and outdoors. However, speeds for downloading files and watching videos online will be slower than you might like.
Using a laptop or tablet here to access the internet will be slow and isn’t recommended.
Wi-fi hot spots? 
I confess it was quite entertaining to watch as realisation dawned on them. We’re half an hour from Glasgow by air - and a whole world away. However, being a kindly bear at heart, I did direct those I came across to our cybercafe. Oh yes - we’re not altogether in the dark ages here. :)[/ot][/FONT]
It isn’t so much about everyone using iOS as everyone using a device that is fit for purpose. I have never owned an iAnything - my first smartphone was a cheap Nokia/Symbian and my current one is a cheap Nokia/Windows. Both have been quite happy with the idea that “touch finger on screen - don’t let go - move finger” is a swipe/scroll movement and not a “follow this link” movement. It’s a basic function of mobile browsing that you need some way to scroll the page without activating links, and any device that doesn’t give this is not fit to be called a mobile internet device. Of course, you don’t have to use a touch screen smartphone - there are still phones that have a small screen and a physical keypad, and these are probably easier inasmuch as they allow keypad control to scroll, which is unambiguous.
I tried Android at the last change and it lasted no more than 1½ hours before I took the SIM card out and went back to my old phone. It was that or throw the blasted thing through the window. I absolutely hated it. I know everyone else seems to be enthralled, but for some reason I just could not get on with it in any way, shape or form. And yet I hit it off with Windows Mobile instantly, even though some of the features that I was annoyed about losing when going from Symbian to Android are still missing.