Sup’s Sporadic Spewage of Syllables

More and more I find people using comboboxes for navigation. It’s silly. It’s ridiculous. It’s probably the only thing abnormally wrong about the Penny Arcade site. In any case, comboboxes aren’t even really comboboxes, they’re just compact listboxes! In any case, comboboxes are meant for forms. They’re meant for selecting one time out of many. Stop using them as archives, indexes, lists, menus and what not. If you use them because the full list takes up too much space, use a freaking frame or iframe, or just use the CSS equivalent of a popup menu or such. Or just put it somewhere where you have space and link to it. Why? I’ll give you three:

1. JavaScript: Well ok I don’t mind JavaScript, but it can hinder users a lot in this case. Here you are using a javascript-based combobox for what’s virtually a list of links. If for some reason your code isn’t cross-browser or people disable it, whoop, there goes half your usability. Not to mention if you have one of those auto-jump comboboxes (that jump to the link as soon as you select it), you’re gonna annoy everyone that accidentally selects an option.

2. It’s a UI component, not a page: For this matter, you can’t view all the items at once, you can’t search through the combobox and you’ll have a hard time getting it to fit both with the website design and the standard UI for whichever OS is being used.

3. No control: Since a combobox doesn’t have links, users can’t click on multiple options. They can’t open links in new windows. They can’t copy the link address straight from the list. And so on. That’s User Usability 101 right there, and you’re making a mockery out of it!

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