OmniWeb 3b4: ALINK display

[John Blumel]

Sorry if this is a duplicate posting, but I sent it originally using the 
wrong account (not the one I'm subscribed through) and wasn't sure if it 
was distributed or not.
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>From the OmniWeb v3b4 release notes:

  - http://www.omnigroup.com/Software/OmniWeb/3/ReleaseNotes.html

    We now highlight the selected anchor with a dashed box 
    (like IE), and use the 'active anchor color' only on 
    links that are actively being fetched (like IE and 
    Netscape). This fixes the annoying bug where clever 
    HTML authors set the active anchor color to be the 
    background color, so as you would select anchors (via  
    right-click or whatever) they'd disappear.

>From the HTML 3.2 Reference Specification:

  - http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32.html#body

    alink 
           Specifies the highlight color used to stroke the 
           text for hypertext links at the moment the user 
           clicks on the link.

It would seem from the W3C document quoted above that the intended 
purpose of the ALINK color is to provide some sort of transitory feedback 
to the user. Based on this, the OmniWeb behavior of highlighting with the 
ALINK color until the new document is displayed would seem to be 
incorrect. The spec would seem to indicate that the link should return to 
the LINK color shortly after the click ends.

I would like to suggest that OmniWeb's behavior be changed to more 
closely follow what, to me at least, seems to be the intention os the 
spec. Setting ALINK to the same value as BGCOLOR is a useful mechanism 
for providing 'tactile' feedback to the user as they select a link and 
closely approximates the effect of clicking on a button. Highlighting the 
selected anchor while the page loads is a nice feature, although, it 
would perhaps be unnecessary if the ALINK highlighting were changed as 
suggested.



John Blumel                               jblumel at omi.tulane.edu
Assistant Director                        (504) 599-6773
Office of Medical Informatics
Tulane University Medical Center