Why DONTCLICK.IT didn't click with anyone?

Because, while dontclick.it is a phenomenal concept, executed beautifully, the fact remains that clicking is still the most effective, accurate, and flexible method for selection—with the possible exception of the keyboard.

Don’t click is a beautiful concept and experiment, but that’s all it is. It doesn’t prove anything about the practicality of clickless interfaces in the real world.

(As an alternative or additional explanation, clicking to select things is the default behavior for a website. It would involve a lot of extra effort on the part of the developer to make a website with a no click interface. It would require a conscious choice to do so, whereas clicking is just… well default. You can design a website that way without thinking about it.)

Yeah, it offers little real benefit, with significant extra effort.

1. If you want to support browsers on mobile phones, text-based browsers, disabled users who need assistive devices, or users who prefer to navigate using the keyboard, you’d need to use regular old links/buttons with click enabled anyway, and then layer the don’t-click mouseover stuff on top of that. So first you’d make your site work the traditional way, and then do a bunch more work to enable don’t-click navigation, just to.. accomplish what, exactly? Impress a few people maybe? (But also probably annoy them.. see below.)

2. DHTML has only recently become powerful enough to smoothly present transitions the way dontclick.it does natively. So in the past, using their navigation style would mean making your whole site in Flash – which has it’s own set of downsides (e.g. getting yourself indexed by search engines is much harder), plus is harder to code, or at least requires a significantly different set of skills than traditional web development.

3. In order to make the experience as smooth as dontclick.it has done, you’d need to get away from page-to-page navigation for transitions in content, and move to showing/hiding information that’s either dynamically loaded (which could be jerky on a slow connection) or preloaded (in which case you have to load a huge portion of your site on each user’s first hit). And then how would you support the browser’s bookmarking function for particular sections of data? Yuck.

4. It’s annoying anyway, because if happen to sweep your mouse across the page to accomplish some unrelated task (e.g. to click a program in the dock), you accidentally trigger navigation.

jasonjackson and lapilofu are spot on.

I don’t see the point…

U all answered my question. Tks collective!

Well, i guess trying it on your iphone would answer your question ;)

The concept of not clicking is something that would have to be implemented from the ground up in the entire computer user interface, not just for individual websites.

Don’t Click wasn’t trying to redefine website design, it was trying to make us think about the way we use the mouse in general.

The dontclick.it interface is developed solely for the mouse. As technology currently stands, the mouse is about to go the way of the dodo.