Chris Casciano’s Place Name Here

Via Tech Nation comes a nice audio interview with engineer, professor and author Henry Petroski. On the heels of his latest book The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems he discusses the differences between Science and Engineering with Dr. Moira Gunn, how they work together, are viewed differently by the media and the public and how they’re funded differently. The 40 minute conversation ends with a discussion about engineering’s role in our world’s infrastructure and in solving problems from energy to agriculture.

Mystery meat navigation is a term web designers know well. It represents the result of a designer getting too clever for their own good and burying site navigational elements under the surface — expecting users to spend the effort to discover them. With important links behind objects that have to be interacted with a site’s visitor loses context and that information a first glance of the page can provide and may leave or give up before finding what they were looking for even if its there.

Mystery Meat Pagination

As a whole, the industry has learned from the past and I don’t encounter many examples of cases of mystery meat navigation in the wild. But with new technology comes new opportunities to run aground. In the last year or two I’ve seen many new sites implementing an infinite scrolling or lazy loading technique with AJAX.

These “remove the need for pagination clicking” techniques really tend to irk me. I haven’t seen one yet that doesn’t hit me as either clunky and heavy handed or that immediately cause me to lose the context of where I’m searching. Spending some time poking around 37signals recently launched web studio directory Haystack prompted this post, and is a good example, but they shouldn’t be picked on as the only or worst offender.

A few weeks ago The Web Standards Project and WaSP Edu Task Force launched a new venture to help create a curriculum outline, guidelines and course samples for those teaching a variety of web related disciplines [it takes more then just good HTML coders to create a good web site]. While I may have had my hands in the code for the site, the real heavy lifting of designing the site and creating the foundation and content for the curriculum project was done by others.