I had to close this conversation into a new thread or post becuase my rebuttel needed a new post.
Please read Jared’s comment first.
Okay, I still don’t agree that you can say that having no sidebars is usability deficient because the only way you can get away with that statement is if you avoid the other pieces of the definition of usability.
Something that usability has is a “former view”. Yes, the former view of blogs is a content column and a sidebar column. I think the reason for this was not of function or usability but because it was easy to manage and produce. The former view always needs to be changed, if not we would have manual transmission cars or browsers without tabbed browsing because the former view would deem any change as having usability issues.
Yes, I said it, not having sidebars, I think, is an advancement. I personally think they are clutter and distracting to such a point the reader blocks them out. When I go to an actual site I rarely look at the sidebar unless it’s for navigation which 99% of all blogs do not have (archives don’t count IMHO).
You bring up Nathan’s comment, but (more…)