What is the value in “scrollovers”?
Those who follow recent trends in Web development have no doubt heard of “scrollovers“. It’s a JavaScript- and CSS-based method for making the text of a typical hyperlink “scroll” upwards, from one color to another. I don’t doubt that others will adapt the technique to other uses.
But when it comes to a technique like this, the big question I find myself asking is, “Why would I use this?” In this case, I don’t know if there really is an answer to that. The effect itself doesn’t bring any benefit, in terms of functionality or usability. It adds to the size of a page. It’s somewhat distracting.
All in all, it reminds me a lot of the scrolling text fad of a decade ago. It’s slightly entertaining the first time you see it, but it will soon be abused and over-used by far too many people, and you’ll wish it’d never been devised. For the sake of our collective browsing experience, let’s hope I’m wrong about it being widely abused.
One good thing about the technique is that it does not prevent the link from working when JavaScript is not enabled. If you’ve ever browsed the Web for any period of time with JavaScript disabled, or have recently used a browser that doesn’t support JavaScript, you have no doubt run into a wide variety of sites that just fail to work. The severity varies quite a bit. With some sites, their dynamic menu system may not work as intended, but at least you’ll be able to view most of the content on their site. Of course, there are other sites where you see a garbled mess, if anything at all. It’s even more pathetic when those sites don’t even need to depend on JavaScript for their normal operation.