I was looking up web developer portfolios on (( the other site )) and came across this one: https://m7mad.dev/

It has a target for the cursor instead of a mouse. While I think most modern web developers do a lot of unnecessary bullshit to “show off” and justify their existence, this particular design got me thinking.

Why do we have a “mouse” for a cursor? Does it really make more sense than have a target similar to the one on this site?

I think most of us don’t even bother to question it, myself included, but it might just be one of those weird relics of the past that we accepted because we thought others knew more than us.

  • cally [he/they]@pawb.socialEnglish
    5·
    3 days ago

    Warning: This is a guess, don’t take my comment as fact! :3

    I think it’s a relic from the past, because computers do images from left-to-right, top-to-bottom, so, since your mouse cursor is an image, the top-left corner is the origin. Maybe it was too much of a hassle to center the crosshair on the origin, and instead developers or designers came up with the arrow shape.

    Since the arrow works fine, it became what’s most commonly used nowadays. The crosshair and dot have a different meaning, for example there’s a cross when resizing or dragging, and drawing programs usually use a dot or a tiny circle instead of the arrow.