Category: it could be called work

media companies and RSS

So while I was looking at the Economist website for information on the Big Mac Index (a piece of genius if ever there was one), I noted there were CNN headlines in a little promo box (provided by Moreover). So CNN headlines are being snarfed by Moreover and appearing on the Economist, and CNN is OK with that. I guess as long as they link back — and they do — it’s no skin off their nose, but isn’t owning their content what they’re all about?

And coincidentally, it was Moreover’s spider crawling willy-nilly over CNN.com years ago that introduced me to RSS and syndication, though there was a gap between my exposure to it and any daily application of what I learned. I built an rss file generator that updated every hour when we fed new URLs to the search engines: useful while it lasted, but I had no idea where rss and rdf were headed.

donkey votes are better than none

In 1922, voter turnout in Australia went down to fifty-eight percent. (Remember, our current rate is only sixty percent!) As a result, government officials became concerned. By 1924, they had made voting compulsory. Now Australia has regularly enjoys heavy voter turnout, even though the sanction for not voting is nominal. Australians make a habit of voting; Americans do not.

The only downside of the Australian system is the presence of what they call “donkey votes.” Some voters merely play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey to decide their vote – apparently because they don’t like any of the candidates, or are simply flouting their citizenship obligations.

The problem of such random voting, however, is small (and in any case, if it is truly random, ought not to affect results). In addition, the problem could be easily solved by adding a space for the voter to register the sentiment “No Candidate Acceptable.” Then the NCA vote should be tabulated – and weighed. If NCA wins, then no one has been elected, and the election law should provide for another race to quickly follow.

This clinches it for me: Australia is the most civilized nation on the planet. Not only do they have this system — and the key for me will be the adoption of NCA as a choice — but they also have coin-operated gas grills along their scenic highways. Hungry? Buy some food and grill it right there at the scenic rest area. No muss, no fuss.

I wanted to emigrate there when I was 18 but was deterred by a communications snafu. It’s not too late, I suppose.

why webdesigners should ignore browser stats

All Things Web: Debunking Browser Stats

Lurking behind the invalid, inflated stats that invariably accompany claims that “99.999% of users use Browser X or Browser Y” is almost always an implicit statement:

“I want a high-sounding excuse for exclusionary page design.”

But browser stats make a poor basis for Web design. Remembering that not all “Netscapes” are created equal, the most widely-used release of Netscape for Windows accounts for roughly 20%-30% of Websurfers. (Let’s split the difference and call it 25%.) Not 80% — but 25%. The world’s second most popular browser accounts for roughly 10-12% of your potential audience. Thus, a visually-driven design that looks great in both browsers covers about a third of your readership.

No matter how you slice it, there’s just no basis for using reports of browser popularity as an excuse for exclusionary design.

I am dealing with this daily right now as I work with page templates that look great in MSIE, or more correctly, Microsoft Visual Interdev, but flat out refuse to render in anything else. Sadly, they parse as valid HTML, so it looks like a bug in the Gecko renderer, but that doesn’t excuse not testing it.

the new religious war

Chad Dickerson

The key outcome, whether you call it scripting or programming, is functional, maintainable, and reasonably well-documented code. [ . . . . ] Good code is good code.

I’m with Chad on this one. And we’re not alone [1] [2]. And these are just the folks I have stumbled across without really looking.

The bottom line seems to be that it’s more important to understand the problem than the syntax of any given language.

another aspect of web design

Effort invested in the design of a URL namespace (Universal Republic of Love!) pays back many times over. Users get to bookmark, email, and otherwise make use of rich URLs. Developers can do the kind of lightweight integration I’ve been harping on for months. But there’s more: developers can also learn a lot about how users behave. “If more people spent an hour or two staring at apache access_log files in action,” Tim wrote to me, “more people would understand the Web a lot better.”

When you organize your URL namespaces for the convenience of users and developers, you are also instrumenting your software to be analyzed in action. Think about the kinds of stories you’d like your access log to be able to tell, and plan accordingly!

thanks to Jon Udell

This is a corollary of an idea I have expressed as “never put anything into a database until you understand how you plan to get it out.” or perhaps more plainly expressed as, let your reports drive your database structure and query design. Applied to a website, this makes a lot of sense as well, in terms of how you name and organize your content.

hypertext, post Xanadu

Ben Hammersley.com: of Cigars and hypertext

I’m stuck by the meanings of the links themselves. Where they are, what they link to, the words they link with and so on all add an enormous amount of information to the piece. Links can be subtle, ironic, funny, informative, maudlin, depressing, even designed not to be followed at all. The browser status bar can be a major source of semantic meaning, without even following a link through.

sometimes link is just a link. to mangle a metaphor . . . . sometimes you can get the joke by seeing where a link would take you. Other times, you need to follow the gesture . . . . depends on how curious you are, how much time you have, how well your host has prepared you . . . . .

the truth will out

Foock yuoo tuu Bork Bork Bork [dive into mark]

_As a reply to MSN’s treatment of its users, Opera Software today released a very special Bork edition of its Opera 7 for Windows browser. The Bork edition behaves differently on one Web site: MSN. Users accessing the MSN site will see the page transformed into the language of the famous Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show: Bork, Bork, Bork!_

Follow the thread to the end . . . .