Wow our friend over at Youngpup.net rants on proper link behaviour.

While I agree whole heartedly with his position and vehemence, I would like to point out something that irks me to no end.

A designer should always design their sites with an eye towards assumed usability, or rather what an average person would expect something on your site to do, when used.

Example: the abovementioned post by Youngpup, when in IE 6 or Gecko based browsers you see a groovy U_I comprised of DHTML and other gnarly code snippets. In the blog display field, there is a vertical scroller, for you to manipulate the content with. So far so good. I don't know about you but when I see a vertical scroller and a text box I assume that I can use the up and down arrows to navigate said text box. This is a basic function of most U_I's and a cornerstone of usability for legions of users.

Getting back to the site, there is no way to manipulate the text box with the keyboard forcing the use of the mouse as the only means of accessing function.

I would also like to point out that the page up and page down keys don't work either.

Adopting flashy new technology is great, and the design of the webapp U_I is impressive. Just not impressive enough to warrant the breakdown or overlooking of basic accessability, and user interaction.