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When I was asked by the proprietor of a small Mandarin language school in London (whose hosting company started blocking the Lynx browser in February 2018) to review their website in 2015, I found the Web design company theyâd used had included a few troublesome features such as âflip boxesâ and video-backgrounds.âThe site stopped using these by 2019âyou can check what older versions looked like on Internet Archive.
(They had in fact asked me to link to them as a favour just to get it into the search engines for the first time, and I said the only legitimate way to do that was an honest review.âI didnât live near enough to try the school, so my review had to be about the web design.)
âFlip boxesâ were apparently written as part of âAvada Themeâ by a company called âTheme Fusionâ but copied by many others.âIf you search the Web for them, you can find the following text at several sites:
Animated flip boxes are simply awesome.âWeâve never met anyone who doesnât love these bad boys.
and to my astonishment, no obvious counterpoint has been published.âSo as a public service, I am hereby pointing out some obvious reasons why animated flip boxes on websites can be bad design.
1. Flip boxes can hide information.âIâm not convinced the Practical Mandarin school really wanted visitors to *fail to see* each courseâs HSK level until they moved the mouse over the course name.âHow is the visitor to know theyâre âsupposedâ to do that?âIs the visitor required to move the mouse everywhere just to see what happens?âThis borders on what Vincent Flanders called âmystery meat navigationâ, except that at least the flip boxes do contain *some* information on the âfrontâ (but they give no obvious clue that more information can be found âbehindâ).
2. Flip boxes donât work without a mouse.âAt least some web designers have the sense to change tack when the site detects a mobile device is in use, but is that detection mechanism guaranteed to *always* find out if the user lacks a mouse?âWhat if the user is on a *tablet* and itâs a type that wasnât listed in the detection logic?â(Even if you donât care about devices that few people use, are you sure youâll be able to keep that detection logic up-to-date with the ânext big thingâ when it comes out?)
3. Flip boxes donât allow their âfront sideâ to be copied.âSuppose the visitor is browsing a site that is not written in their own language, and wants to use dictionary software on some of the words.âThey wonât be able to use their mouse to copy and paste the information on the front of the âflip boxâ if that box flips over as soon as they get anywhere near it.âThere are ways of working around this, but itâs likely to be frustrating.
4. Flip boxes can interact badly with user stylesheets.âThe information is generally visible in a text-mode browser such as Lynx, but if you use a graphical browser with a user-supplied stylesheet that doesnât override *all* of the relevant transform and transform-style CSS rules, youâll likely end up with very âmessyâ interaction.âMy own stylesheets for low vision have of course been updated to override all transform rules when changing the layout.
I hope that web designers can think more carefully about how they use these things in future.âI feel partly responsible, because I was involved in the W3C WAI panel, and perhaps I should have foreseen this and said something when the W3C were writing up the CSS 3 specifications that made flip boxes possible.âBut I failed to spot it at that time.âSorry, world.
All material © Silas S. Brown unless otherwise stated.