Heather suggests that in developers’ excitement to do cool new stuff and use cool new tools and techniques “we stopped letting people do very normal web things”. Things like:
- the ability to copy text so you can then paste it
- ensuring elements which navigate also behave like normal links by offering standard right-click and keyboard shortcut options etc. Which is to say – please use the anchor element and leave it alone to do its thing
- letting people go back using the back button
- letting people scroll with native scrollbars. Relatedly, letting people get to the links at the bottom of the page rather than having infinite scrolling results which mean that the footer is always just beyond reach!
- letting the user’s browser autocomplete form fields rather than making them type it