About This Particular Macintosh 6.04 - eDisk

uttons are actually popup menus, but (unlike IE 4.5) there’s no indication of this until afteryou’ve moused over them.Print Preview still draws a huge dialog box that fills the screen and cannot be resized, andsince there is no standard close box you must dismiss it with a push button labelled “Close.”Likewise, the information windows for favorites and auction items lack close boxes.HTML form buttons, radios, and checkboxes still don’t look like their standard AppearanceManager counterparts, nor do they properly disable themselves when IE is in the background.And as I mentioned before, the text on form buttons is colored with the toolbarcolor instead of black.Microsoft has finally chosen function over form in its implementation of drag and drop.Dragging images still drags transparent “ghosts,” but large images are now reduced tothumbnails and dragging them is therefore much smoother.IE 5 is the first browser that lets you select words and paragraphs by double- and tripleclickingon them (as is standard on the Macintosh). And it finally lets you drag text selectionsfrom the browser window to other applications or the desktop. Unfortunately,Microsoft decided that when you drag text to the desktop it should create a SimpleText documentinstead of a text clipping. According to the Mac IE product manager 13 :Text clippings are cool, but they are not incredibly useful in the real world. They are not cross platformcompatible, you can’t open them in most Mac applications, and they don’t do a good job ofhandling large text selections. A lot of novice users use File->Open to try to get text clippings intotheir word processing or email applications and that doesn’t work. We are very comfortable withthis decision.To me, it seems that Microsoft does not understand how people use clippings files. There isno excuse for their implementing this non-standard behavior without providing an optionto support clippings files as other Mac applications do. Furthermore, if you drag a lot of textto the desktop—more than 32K—SimpleText will be unable to open the resulting text file,while most applications support dragging in similarly large clippings with ease.12. http://www.atpm.com/5.12/paradigm.shtml13. http://db.tidbits.com/tbtalk/tlkmsg.lasso?MsgID=6458ATPM 6.04 ← 101 →Stuff: Internet Explorer 5.0