qwghlm.co.uk : because all the other domain names were taken

John Peel has died.

Bye John. We’ll miss you.

Allegedly, Alex Ferguson was pelted with soup in the tunnel after Arsenal’s defeat at the hands of Mike Riley Man United. Presumably it occured after a clash between Campbell and Heinze…

Further to the previous post, Tom’s blog entry was all about International Caps Lock Day – the ensuing Metafilter thread celebrating it may be the most terrifying accumulation of all the bad things the Internet has spawned, ever (goatse excepted). Al Gore must be rolling in his grave.

Tom has reminded me that Firefox fully supports the <blink> tag. Bastards.

Luckily, you can get rid of the blinking and save your sanity. Type about:config in the address bar, then Enter, and you’ll get a big list of scary-looking options. Scroll down to the preference called browser.blink_allowed, which has a value true. Right-click on that option, and select ‘Toggle’, and the value should become false. Quit Firefox, then relaunch it, and all should be well.

(Thanks to this handy page of FF resources)

The House of Commons have released a full summary of MPs expenses for the first time, which is good, a nice small step to further transparency and happiness.

But the format they choose for the expense tables, inexplicably, is in Adobe PDF format. Why? They’re just bloody tables for God’s sake. HTML or XHTML would have been fine.

I ask this as I think it would be great to integrate the data from this with stuff from the excellent They Work For You website, say, so we can keep track of what our MPs say and what they spend the money we give them on.

PDF makes it much tougher to extract and export the data contained therein in whatever format we choose (which we have the right to, as citizens who stump up the cash). Perhaps this is one of the reasons why they used PDF, so it’s harder (though by no means impossible) to re-render. This perhaps sums up why I dislike PDF so much – not only as the files are bloated and slow to render, but it takes all the shit features of paper and foists them upon electronic media. XHTML documents are quicker to load, are much more parseable and re-renderable. By being more flexible, they have the potential to be more accessible and user-friendly (though admittedly not everyone follows this, but the point is at least the potential is there). Rather than have the formatting data act as a mere guide to page rendering that is separate from the content therein, PDF takes the anal, paper-based design view that everything must be exactly in its place, conflating style and content, and forcing the author’s formatting upon the user. Oh, and the format is proprietary rather than open standards.

PDF turns online information from a accessible and usable format into nothing much better than pieces of paper. Which is fine if all you want to do is print it out, but online they are a shoddy way of providing information that does not do the web justice. And with the addition of the ability to include hyperlinks and form fields in more modern versions of PDF, Adobe are making an attempt to further attempt at attacking XHTML’s position as format of choice for the web. Can you imagine a web where every site was in PDF? Ack.

Anyway, enough ranting for one day, I’ll stop now…

I have noticed more and more, these days, that web forms are demanding that you have to enter your email address twice, the second being a ‘confirmation’ of the first (the latest culprit I’ve seen being the otherwise useful Telephone Preference Service – for more examples see here).

Now…why? Forms that are used to decide a password ask you to enter the password twice, for the simple reason that you can’t see what you’ve typed, and so you have no idea if it is correct; the confirmation step is there to make sure you haven’t got it wrong. Fine. But for an email address, you can see what you’ve typed already! It might not even have its intended effect, as many people will just copy and paste their email address from the previous form field and propogate the error. And if you’re going to demand the poor user type (or copy & paste) their email address twice, why not ask them to confirm their name, phone number, address, etc. while they’re at it?

I don’t know why this annoys me so much. Probably because it’s not so much the inconvenience, more the mind-boggling stupidity that goes behind it.