Saturday, June 26, 2004

Fitt's Squared Law

Which is easier to click: a 30-by-30 square or a 900-by-1 line? Clearly the square. However by Fitt's Law, they both have the same area. Thus I introduce "Fitt's Squared Law", which states that the time to acquire a target is monotonically decreasing in the size of the incircle (largest inscribed circle) of the target. So, a 33.8 pixel diameter circle is even easier to click than a 30-by-30 square. It is also pi(33.8)^2 = 900 pixels in area. Fitt's Squared Law has great implications for web browsers because all links of text are always short and wide, instead of square-like. At the very least, it asks for the Web browsers to think of pages a composed of boxes (inside boxes, and so forth), like the way TeX does. They may already do that--Mozilla DOM Viewer shows that off. However in the bigger picutere, we may want text swooping smoothly over and under circular-shaped links in text kind of like air around an airfoil. I hope to describe more in detail what web browsers should look like in the future.

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