The Web is becoming more fragmented, and not quite so World-Wide. More and more often, I get to sites that can't show me what I'm there for because of where I seem to be coming from.
I know there's nothing in the internet's protocols that reliably dobs in where you are coming from, so it never really gets in the way.
Having recently moved from the UK to Canada, I naturally want to keep in touch with the old country. Moreover, I watch a number of things from our southern neighbours. As a geek I have no trouble routing my traffic so that I can see the end result. It's always a little clumsy but works in the end. If the BBC let me pay for an overseas TV licence, I'd likely jump at the chance.
I've been misidentified as German, Swedish and, very occasionally, Polish. If it's just Google taking a best-guess as to which site you'd likely prefer with a clear link back to what you actually asked for, that's fairly harmless.
[Image from the NASA Earth Observatory, by Reto Stöckli, based on data from NASA and NOAA. Thank you.]
More on First Two Ws…
Testing Web pages is a pretty complex task. Very often we settle for too little, checking little more than:
- that our markup validates against the spec
- that a simple link-checker doesn't find dead links
- & that some monkey-testing doesn't turn up any glaring errors
Those are good checks to make, but we need to do a lot better.
I want to make some declarative statements about what is expected of different pages, and have them run routinely. For complicated pages, that depend on user-supplied, database-held or offsite data, I'd like to run the tests on any pages I might ever ship, and give the administrators a decent stab at recreating the error and damn-well fixing it.
Thankfully, the CSS people have done a fine job of allowing you to pick out parts of an HTML document and then apply styles to them. Better yet, we've just about reached the point where smart designers can express what they want in CSS, without needing to write anything terribly complicated.
This is a little idea for how to do that. There's no implementation yet, but I'm looking for feedback on doing it this way. The basic idea is to express some useful, human-level tests in a CSS-like language that make sense to more than code-nerds, and use them to test individual Web pages, or entire sites, and be more confident that they do all that you expect, and nothing that you don't.
Update at 16:03 BST, 8th April 2009 – Minor tweak to the examples.
More on Cascading Test Sheets…
I've got a little more diligent recently about using encryption where I can. In particular, several sites allow you to use an encrypted connection, but don't force it:
More on Using secure Web sites more frequently…
It's a little thing, but if we are to have a hope of educating users to protect themselves online that reputable sites don't behave just like the fraudsters.
Here's a quick spot of fuckwittery from Harvard Business Review.
More on Harvard Business Review Fuckwittage…
Argh.
The front page of Halifax's online banking has an extravagantly stupid 'feature'.
Somehow, they have managed to publish their warnings about phishing attacks so that they look like, well, a bit of a phishing attack!
Pictures of the stupidity
The sign-up for SemanticCamp London is open.
If you are near London and interested in using the Web with meaning, then grab a spot before they are all gone. It'll be on the 16th and 17th of February, at the Department of Computing at Imperial College (or 'work' from my point of view).
We also have some good pubs nearby, for refreshments afterwards.
I'm very pleased that the BBC have made a version of their catch-up service, iPlayer, that isn't tied to Windows and Internet Explorer.
There are a few good things, programmes are addressable at the episode/programme level, not just the series. That's a great thing, and as I've said before, the BBC's new Programme Support is a fantastic step forward for Tv metadata.
The quality is fairly good, but variable. It's obviously worse than television, and quite a bit worse than recordings people distribute amongst themselves using BitTorrent or Usenet. HIGNFY S34E09 was pretty watchable, full-screen on a 21 inch monitor, from across the room. Last week's Film 2007 was unwatchably blocky, for me. The BBC (and their Trust, and the rightsholders) should recognise that that is what they are competing with, and if the normal distribution mechanisms are worse, we'll get good, shiny, socially acceptable alternatives built by the crazy people.
More on Trying to use the BBC's new iPlayer…
A long time ago, I wrote gallery.future-i.com, and I was particularly exercised about using clean URLs (and still am).
One place I feel I did a really nice job was in making the search URLs pretty nice, e.g. a search for 'mary' lives at:
http://gallery.future-i.com/search/mary
I did that in the middle of 2001, and I expect plenty of others did similar things by then, too. For me, the tricky bit is all done by Apache's mod_rewrite, which takes incoming requests to your web site, and let's you rejig it to pass parameters to scripts without exposing all that grunge to the outside world. It isn't the only way to do it, but it is powerful and effective.
My annoyance now is that Amazon have a patent on a very similar technique, covering URLs for search results of the form http://somedomain/flibble, filed in 2004.
I was impressed by Amazon's A9 when it launched, principally for the clean URLs for search.
That doesn't mean they own the idea, which is plainly in play before that. And don't get me started on parallel invention, making it all the sillier.
I hope the patent boils away in a sea of prior art.
[Via Buzz Out Loud #589, Slashdot coverage]
The BBC have a great new Web site – BBC Programme Support (more info from Tom Scott of the BBC). This is especially good for Web nerds like me, but it will help make link-centric television work for Real Human Beings, too.
There are a few quirks in how things are listed right now but I'm sure they'll shake out in due course. What's great about this service is that the Beeb is committing to long-term, stable URIs for their programmes, with a single, clear link for each show, irrespective of how and when it is shown or repeated.
[Via Chris]
More on BBC Programme Support…
I'm unsurprised at recent developments at Oxford as over-zealous proctors fine students for misbehaviour using evidence from Facebook.
I think there's some real trouble with people understanding quite what they're publishing, and to whom.
Worse than that, I think people have a false sense of security when they tag their updates as 'friends only' on sites like Twitter, Facebook and so forth.
More on Phoney privacy…
It's a depressing thought. There's a site you love, you have poured heart and soul and energy into it.
More and more frequently, I find myself fighting the corner of not doing "search engine optimisation".
More on Better than 'Search Engine Optimisation'…
Chris Anderson (of Long Tail fame) has an apology for an ad that Wired ran on "practically every page" of their Web site that accidentally stood on top of the content you might reasonably want to read.
It makes me think about what makes an ad irritating – or entertaining – and I think getting in the way of what you're watching/reading/doing is the main point.
More on Irritating ads…
Tagged: Media, Web
Posted at 08:59 BST, 13th June 2007.
Now I'm a bit of a pedant, so I do get quite exercised about definitions and terminology.
To me this site isn't a blog. There's a bloggish part to it, and the word is certainly all over the code that underpins it. It just isn't that important to me that it's seen as a blog. If that's a helpful crutch for people, they might call it that. I won't.
More on Not a blog…
Tagged: Rants, Web
Posted at 16:15 BST, 11th June 2007.
I've been using pogdesign's Calendar for TV for some time. It covers many series I watch, and makes it easy to remember what I should be recording or borrowing from a friend.
It used to be full of swanky, fragile Web 2.0 AJAX goodness. Thankfully, they've just overhauled things. It's now a staunch database-backed site, storing a user's information in a database, not their cookies.
I was a fan before, despite the technology choices. I'm a much bigger fan now.
And with the new iCal feed of what you want to watch, I'll be able to automate more of the recordings, which is fab.
Tagged: Upbeat, Media, Web
Posted at 09:22 BST, 24th April 2007.
While using my Halifax Visa card online recently, I bumped into the Verified by Visa programme.
It's a nice idea, in theory, but the implementation I saw was woeful. It was depressingly similar to a phishing attack, warmly assuring me about security by chatting about it in the Web page, while hiding the parts of my browser that can tell me that more sensibly.
Like most geeks, I try and educate my less geeky family and friends about how to behave safely with technology. Things like this make that job harder.
Update at 22:51 BST, 21st April 2007 – Follow-up: Guardian coverage
More on 'Verified' by Visa…
I've been stuck in a few conversations recently about Web accessibility, which has led me to think a little more about what the proper balance is between shinyness and usefulness.
In short, I don't want to poke people in the eye – they usually don't deserve it.
More on Noddy rules for accessibility…