::scr IA Goldrush (was Ramblings of a Classic Refugee)

[Alex Robinson]

> An obvious side effect was the broken back button, but cut & paste was
> also broken, normal right-click contextual menus were also broken. Have
> they finally gotten Flash to blend in cleanly? If not then it still
> hasn't been fixed yet -- which would be too bad, because if it 
> *did* just
> Blend In, then all my objections to Flash would dissolve at a stroke.

I've no idea how cleanly blended in it is - it's not out yet so 
all there is to go on is Marketing hype / Webmonkey's sneaky 
peak (marketing via other means).

I wouldn't have bothered responding as I think the broken back 
button is a non-issue. It's borken/confusing enough in many 
browsers. What behaviour should a user expect when confronted 
with frames? Plus cutting and pasting is often borken in 
browsers by applying certain bits of CSS whilst Flash 5 saw the 
introduction of cut and pastable text (if the author desires it) 
yadder yadder enough already. The reason I am replying is to 
highlight part of the puff for Watson:

"The dreaded browser back and reload buttons? We left them out 
too! With most Watson plug-ins, web data auto-updates without 
the pointless page re-rendering of a browser!"

See. You're coming from an oldskool antique web user / 
programmer perspective (and yes, I am down with that) but that's 
not what "ordinary" people want according to the research that 
Watson's creators must have carried out.