Yesterday I followed the Masem link to get to Apocalypse 3. Today, I went to perl.com to reread the apocalypse and did not find it! After a more thorough examination of the banner page, I realized that there was two images on the top of the page with nice nice links below them. One of the images included the Larry Wall head and the link was The third installment of Perl 6's design:Operators but I did not see either. Larry Wall managed to become invisible!

I remember Jakob Nielsen talking somewhere about that acquired blindness that allows us to navigate without seeing the images^Wads. How intelligent of Google to have non intrusive ads as text in the page that lists the results of your search: they become more visible!

So the spiffy design of the perl.com page to make the Apocalypse stand out made it in effect invisible to me! The link should have been repeated on the normal textual only material of the page to navigates to recent articles on the site.

Another example of gif creating "invisibility" is also gif as link. I am on a software overcrowded home page. I want to download the software. I can safely assume that the find feature of my browser will lead me directly to that link. Wrong: the link is a not text but a gif representing "download" on a spiffy font.

-- stefp