If I click on a link, I am initiating an action. If I fill in a form and press a submit button, I am initiating an action. But if I move my mouse over a page element, I am not initiating an action. Chances are I’m on my way to initiating an action (like clicking a link or pressing a button) but if I brush past a link on the way, that does not mean that I want something to happen in response.
Most browsers display the value of a title attribute as a tool-tip after a suitable pause. Generally this works pretty well as long as the tool-tip is relatively small and self-contained. Ever come across an instance of a title attribute with a large amount of text? It just feels wrong. There are economies of scale when it comes to displaying information triggered by a mouseover.
All of this is by way of introduction to the topic of those bloody annoying Snap previews that are quite literally popping up all over the place.
I’m not alone in my annoyance. Lorelle VanFossen has put together an excellent list of the problems caused by these rude and intrusive interlopers. As well as listing the accessibility issues for low-vision and motor-impaired users, she makes the very valid point that these pop-ups actively destroy the act of reading:
There’s a small author-part of me that hopes what I write resembles some action-packed-page-turning-thriller and that people are glued to their screens eagerly embracing every word I write. I’d hate to have that experience be interrupted by an annoying pop-up window of any kind. Destroys the interaction of the reader with the written word, doesn’t it?
The way that the developers at Snap view web pages reminds of the Far Side cartoon:
Blah blah LINK blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah LINK blah blah blah blah blah…
Lorelle’s frustration is particularly acute because the Snap previews showed up on her Wordpress.com blog because Matt thought it would be cool to roll out this “feature” to 10% of Wordpress.com users.
Luckily, Lorelle and other hijacked blogs can turn the feature off. As pointed out by John Gruber, Jason Kottke and Michael Heilemann, the rest of us can also deactivate these annoying things. I should also point out that you can deactivate them directly from a preview by clicking on the “options” link in the pop-up and setting either a local or a global cookie to switch off the previews.
But this is like opt-out spam. I shouldn’t be confronted by these intrusive and annoying pop-ups to begin with. Offering them as a feature to users who want them strikes me as a perfectly reasonable implementation. This is the perfect example of something that should have been implemented like a Greasemonkey script: give users the choice and the power to activate this flashy feature. But don’t foist it on us and then claim it’s our responsibility to disable it.
If you haven’t seen the Snap previews in action, you can find them on TechCrunch and Vitamin, to give just two examples. Their presence on TechCrunch isn’t really surprising given that the site is devoted to pointing out all that is flashy and pointless on the web. But the gang over at Vitamin really ought to know better.