Category Archives: web standards

Facebook should allow groups to be rationalised

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I’ve just had a look on Facebook, for a group for people concerned about the nasty Phorm cyber-spying system. I found these:

  • Save UK internet privacy – reject ISPs that use Phorm (1,347 members)
  • Deny Phorm (48 members)
  • Arrest Ben Verwaayen for criminal offences under RIPA with regards to Phorm (26 members)
  • Fight back against PHORM (19 members)
  • Bad Phorm! (9 members)
  • Got Phorm? (7 members)
  • Stop ISP’s from breaching customers privacy!!!! (174 members)
  • Stop BT, TalkTalk, VirginMedia From Selling Your Web Browsing Information! (38 members)
  • Things you need to know about your Virgin Media/Blueyonder/NTL Broadband (21 members)

The situation is the same, or worse, for other subjects, too.

Firstly, I wonder what it is about people, that they set up a new group, rather than searching for, and joining, an existing one?

But, more importantly, Facebook needs some sort of mechanism to encourage, and then facilitate (with the agreement of their members) such groups to merge.

Spatial references to page layout considered harmful

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This screenshot (linked to a larger version) shows a TechCrunch article in Google Reader, as it appears “out of the box” (apart from cropping, blurring irrelevant content and the addition of orange highlighting). Note the position of the logo, described as being “shown at right”.

[Screenshot of Google Reader]

In this era of mobile devices, feed readers and other such proxies — not to mention aural browsers and assistive devices with no spatial component — referring to the location of an element on the screen is stupid. Harmful, even.

Taxonomic machine tags

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Images on Flickr (and other sites?) can be tagged with “machine tags“. For living things, these can convey taxonomic information. For example:

taxonomy:binomial=Larus melanocephalus

taxonomy:genus=Larus

Flickr collapses these to:

“larusmelanocephalus” and “larus“, but note that subtracting one from the other gives the specific epithet, “melanocephalus“.

For subspecies, use:

taxonomy:binomial=Larus glaucoides
taxonomy:genus=Larus
taxonomy:subspecies=Larus glaucoides kumlieni

and for other ranks:

taxonomy:class=Aves

Here’s an example: http://flickr.com/photos/pigsonthewing/2238938901/

Well, what are you waiting for? Tag away!

It's hardly rocket science…

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“NASA has launched NASA.gov 5.0, the first major redesign of its primary Web site in more than four years” said the news item in NASA’s “Breaking News” RSS feed. It continued “The new design goes beyond a cosmetic facelift. It features a new level of interactivity and customization…”. Intrigued, I clicked through the link, and was soon presented with an alarming warning: “There’s a problem with your browser or settings. Your browser or your browser’s settings are not supported.” at the top of a really ugly page:

NASA-new-website

Since I was using the current release of Firefox, that seemed ludicrous. As, indeed, it was, because it turned out that the “problem” was that I had Javascript disabled.

Note to NASA: many people have Javascript disabled, sometimes for security and sometimes by their employer or other host organisation. Sometimes, it’s not supported by their mobile device, and sometimes by the assistive technologies that their disabilities require them to use. Your most important visitor, Google, also has Javascript disabled.

NASA-new-website-2

If they can’t get a simple website right, how on Earth (sic) are they going to put people on Mars?