Just say no to validation porn, says Ben
Ben Hammersley says, about his switch from Movable Type to iWeb: "I'm using iWeb, and I like it. There I admitted it. Forgive me, web purists, but this is really nice. ... The whole thing is frictionless - and frictionless tools are what I want this year." This is the feeling I got from the OPML Editor when I started trying it out as a blogging tool.
In another entry, Ben rails against "validation porn" - and then, as if to just tweak the web geek's nose... the whole text of the article is a solid image, impenetrable to copy-and-paste quotation. I think I threw up in my mouth a little there, but I get his point.
Archived Comments
Amusingly, the text is in the "longdesc" attribute in the source. Although this might not help blind users, since londgesc is supposed to contain a URI.
Heh, oh yeah, that had occurred to me too - but I forgot to mention it while I was busy being incredulous :)
I unsubscribed him shortly after he switched to iWeb. The first annoyance I noticed was that his feed is crippled. That alone, I can live with. But to add insult to injury, it forces me to visit pages on which the text is calcified in images, meaning that the font and colour overrides I’ve set in my browser do not apply. And now he claims I wasn’t getting any value from any of that egg-head stuff anyway. Any more ways to diss his readers?
I also vehemently disagree with the sentiment that nobody cares about Amazon’s URIs.; I find myself cursing at the mile-long cruft whenever I want to paste a link to a book. Conversely I often compose addresses blindly on sites where they have a logical structure, such as when looking for something on del.icio.us, search.cpan.org, perldoc.perl.org or php.net. URIs are the primary user interface of a site.
Why not publish in PDF if you’re going to go against the web’s grain anyway? That gets you frictionless publishing tools.
Yeah, I mean I do really get what he's getting at... but and there really is a purpose behind web standards besides nerdgasms. One of the first things I always seem to do lately when I visit a site - especially since I increasingly can nowadays - is change the font size and color for easier reading. And, sometimes, I like to look at the URL to see what date this post is from when I'm most of the way down the page, since most blogs tend to use date-based URLs these days.
Ugh.. i'm just trying really hard to separate my offended nerd sensibilities and appreciate the pragmatism, which I've done to some extent, but wow there's a bad smell around that iWeb produce. Eh, but no offense to Ben... I can grok the joy of a tool getting out of your way for once
Now, if only that tool also didn't make such cruddy sausage
Yuck.
That's all I have to say about that.
Oh, I understand the joy, for sure. I certainly don’t think that the tools which produce valuable results are very pragmatic yet. We’ve only just advanced them past paleolithic stage in the past two or three years.
And he contradicts himself: frictionless tools mean he gets his site done sooner, so they provide value to him as the publisher – at the cost of value for his readers. That’s in line with his frictionless tools post, but the exact opposite of what he then goes to say in his validation porn post.
Amazon URIs can all be shortened trivially. Everything after the ASIN is for Amazon's own internal tracking purposes or for associates links or whatever. The minimal URI you need to link to most products is http://amazon.com/gp/product/ASIN.
I know (and it’s good that the canonical URI is always derivable from a crufty one). I was just saying that users do care about this stuff.
Sure, and I agree, but there are various technical reasons why the URI has all the cruft in it (like, supporting users who have gimpy cookies and users who haven't gotten an account yet, and tracking associate links). It's also a lot less bad than it used to be, especially on URIs which begin with /gp/ instead of /exec/obidos/ (the latter of which have been getting phased out for a while, and which are finally mostly gone).
Amazon really does care about the best user experience possible from every perspective. Remember that Amazon employs plenty of geeks who use the site too. :)
That wasn’t the point – it was simply that users do care about gunk-free URIs. Amazon was just a random example I used because that’s what Ben picked; it could have been any other site. It is great that Amazon are cleaning up, I’m just not talking about that.