Thursday, March 5, 2009

Google Chrome: Missing Link

Google Chrome - the world's best browser by a long shot

Idea to improve browser semantics

The target in links - when it open a chrome window has a hoverplate that shows the named target.

This encourages developers to use named targets:

breakdown:
a href = url target = name

tab name is a hover plate

a hover link is a link that actions on hover
a hover tab is a distinctly styled tab that overlays the title of a browser tab
a hover plate is a set of hover tabs that occur above the tabs showing the target that derived the link - ie which page spawned it and the target name. As this is usually relative (_blank) the plates are sparsely populated.

This becomes useful as Chrome is so efficient - users end up with hundreds of windows opened as cache only. Rapid interpage navigation is strongly facilitated by hover link.

Copyright © 2009 by Nicholas Alexander.