One important interaction indicator on the web is the mouse cursor. The default cursor arrow changes into a pointing hand when you hover over links for example, which indicates they are indeed links and can be clicked on. It also changes into other things to differentiate context, for example it can change into a text input cursor when hovering over text fields to indicate you can type there.

When styling your website with CSS, in some cases you may lose the correct cursor type for certain elements. It’s important to retain this indicator as it will inform the user about how the item they’re hovering over can be used (see affordances). The solution is easy: if the cursor type is wrong, specify it using the CSS “cursor” property.

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Raymond Selda has published a tutorial about how to Create a Tabbed Content Rotator using jQuery and the interface library called jQuery UI. This effect can be used effectively on your homepage to present customers with your products and services. Very nice user experience!

Punchcut is explaining some of the things we need to consider when designing UIs for touch-based interfaces such as the Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, HP’s TouchSmart tx2 multi-touch laptop, Microsoft Surface.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have just announced a new tag, which we can use to tell the search engines which URL it should have for the current page. They want to clean up duplicate urls on sites. The syntax is pretty simple:

An ugly url such as http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 can specify in the HEAD part of the document the following:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/page.html"/>

That tells search engines that the preferred location of this url (the “canonical” location, in search engine speak) is http://example.com/page.html instead of http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 .

Check out this video by Matt Cutts of Google who explains the new element in-depth:

There are already some plugin for WP Canonical links, or e-commerce Magento plugin canonical URL’s extension, and Drupal CMS.

I would love to hear what you think about the canonical links.

Discover more about how this works in practice…

• Read Effective Browser Support
• Read A Demonstration of Graded Browser Support