atc 

jQuery is a good thing. It allows you to minimise the amount of Javascript you write, while maintaining elegance and ease-of-use. jQuery.com has recently relaunched with a brand-new design. Feedback from around the web was initially quite negative due to a bizarre decision by someone who thought it’d be great to apply a ‘rockstar’ ethos to the whole redesign. The new landing page initially had a horribly misplaced drawing of a rockstaresque character splattered across the majority of the screen. It was nothing short of embarassing really. It screamed of teenage identity crisis.

Kudos to jquery.com though, who listened to their critics and removed the image. Right now, the site’s looking cool but still a little out of place. This is a Javascript library, not a corporate website. Anyhow, I digress.

Another element of the homepage that thoroughly annoys me is the tooltips on the three links titled “Lightweight footprint”, “CSS 3 compliant” and “Cross-browser”. To me, Web-2.0 (I’m sorry for using that phrase) style UI elements are largely about usability and common sense. jQuery seems to be an embodiment of that, and allows developers to enhance their sites greatly with a small amount of effort.

Shocked and awed I was then, when I moved my mouse around the page while reading only to find these terribly intrusive ‘tooltips’ that show when you hover over the aforementioned links. Right out of how-not-to-do-widgets-school it seems. Those elements on the page go against the original intentions behind underlining text (denoting a hypertext link). Not only are the tooltips pointless, but as widgets they’re very annoying to use. Hovering over them can sometimes show another (unrelated), as well as them hiding text around them – forcing the user to have to move their mouse again, only to find that they’ve set off yet another tooltip. They’re too large, unnecessary and bad-practice.

Whilst I can see the usefulness of such a plugin, I think it’s a perfect example of how not to do it. I can’t sleep at night because it annoys me so much.

Seriously!