URL

Unreadable URLs are bad

October 7, 2007 by Michael Boyle

Scott Rosenberg takes up the case in his post, Terror of tinyurl.

From the earliest days of the Web to the present, there’s been a fundamental split between people who get the value of “human-readable URLs” and people who don’t.[…]
Today, though, we’re taking a step backwards, or at least sideways, in the cause of human readability, thanks to the growing popularity of the “tinyurl.”

I have had this discussion (arguing for human-readable URLs) with well-intentioned but clueless developers so many times it borders on the absurd. In fact, Nadia and I were just discussing it last night! Like Rosenberg, I understand why it’s important in the twitterverse, but outside of that relatively limited context, tinyurl is a user-hostile pain in the backside.

Brainstorms and Raves

January 17, 2002 by Michael Boyle

Brainstorms and Raves

: Accessibility Lockout for Olympics 2002 Site — Again?!. A good quick rundown of some problems with the official site for the Games this winter. Add to it that the site’s URLs are virtually useless. Accessibility in the case of this site is a problem even for fully able people with regular browsers using all the tools built in. It’s too bad, it’s a huge missed opportunity. Doing a site like that should be an opportunity for some really innovative work – but it was clearly squandered. I’d love to get my hands on a project like that and hire a dream team to develop the thing.

I received an interesting

May 17, 2001 by Michael Boyle

email yesterday:

This Friday May 18th, in an unprecedented gesture, the Union des crivains du Qubec will present an evening of ENGLISH poetry and literature in performance.
The show is entitled “Howls and Whispers (Souffles et hurlements)” and it highlights a remarkable cultural breakthrough that has occurred in the spoken word scene in Montreal.
Due to pioneer work by a list of names on both sides of the linguistic divide, the scene for performance literature has become a place where English and French performers know each other, work together and share an audience – an altogether amazing event when one considers that poetry is probably the most language-specific cultural activity one can find.

The show will feature a panoply of the most interesting writers and performers in the city, including Cat Kidd and jack beets, Fortner Anderson, and musician Tom Walsh – all in one of the best locations in town.
[ahem – I should have mentioned that location – it’s at the Lion D’Or, on Ontario St. E. Did you know that Ontario St had that name before the province of Ontario did?]

I almost missed

November 16, 2000 by Michael Boyle

Steven Johnson’s additional comments about his Times piece, Go With Fuzzy Logic, in Feed’s ‘Loop’ discussion area. Due to an ampersand in the URL I can’t make the direct link, but head on over and take a look. “According to Florida election officials, punch card machines had 32 errors per 1,000 votes, while the OpScan devices had only 2. As I said in the piece, the real question is: which counties are using punch cards, and which are using OpScan.”

Upon further consideration,

November 14, 2000 by Michael Boyle

although Netscape 6 does work in broad terms – and what it does well it does very well – it is so rife with bugs I can’t even think of any commercial software or shareware that I’ve ever used that is as unfinished.

Luckily few of the bugs are crashing bugs, and my machine hasn’t frozen due to any of them. But they drastically affect the usefulness of Netscape as an alternative browser. Some examples of bugs I’ve found:

text entry boxes are flaky (text jumps around, spaces and soft wrapping is wonky);
it uses its own interface elements, not widgets from the UI, and so is very slow at rendering certain things, and when it does, they don’t conform with the OS under which it runs;
changes to preferences don’t always take;
new windows are quite slow to open;
some of the program’s other behaviour deviates both from what one would expect from the OS and from older versions of Netscape;
and the whole thing takes at least twice as long to load (in spite of having fewer plugins in my case) than IE;
the whole thing takes up twice the space (browser only, no email stuff included on my machine) and more memory than IE5;
and I can’t seem to drag and drop URLs or links onto the favourites bar.

Add to that the fact that I can’t scroll with the wheel on my mouse and their own skin updating/loading procedure doesn’t seem to work and it’s a mess. The worst though? They’ve buried their release notes so you can’t even make a reasoned judgement for yourself without downloading the installer. It should be online, and prominent. [I found the release notes after posting this]