Greetings,

I always liked to make status messages whenever the mouse moves over a link, to make it look neater. E.g., when the user moves over the privacy policy.. the window status bar would look like: "Please Read our Privacy Policy". --> Looks nicer.

Two questions:

1) Is it nice?

2) if someone right clicks the message goes away, how do you stop it from going away (some DHTML menus do that with javascript).

Thank You,

I don't think that is a very nice idea.

For a few reasons :

On IE, the status bar is disabled by default, and many people don't bother to turn it on.

I like to know where I'm going when I click on a link. I don't want the status bar to change, I want it to show me where the link goes. Why? People used this trick to have unsuspecting users redirected to other sites (usually gateways). You can have the status bar say "Privacy Policy" -- but have the link pointing to some other site.

Also, in Mozilla -- when there is any website that is messing with the status bar, the message on the status bar doesn't change if you have a few tabs open. Open a website that changes the status bar -- now open another website in a new tab, the status bar will remain whatever the first site changed it to.

There are better ways to provide friendly links. For example, give your link a title.

I would not change the status bar text. I'm with fyrestrtr. when I see a site that tries to change the status bar text, the thing that comes to my mind is "this guy is trying to hide where he's sending me" I don't believe i've ever thought "wow, this guy is helpful by providing extra info about a link"

if you want to provide more info about a link I would suggest sticking it in a title tag (that's the little tooltip/hints that popup like the "alt" tag on an image) you use it like:


<a href="http://www.google.com/" title="Searching 4,285,199,774 web pages">google</a>


on the other hand, thanks to Firefox's option to disable the "allow scripts to: Change status bar text" I never have to worry about seeing that stuff anyway.

I agree, it sort of breaks what the status bar was intended for.