I take it back about the Independent’s new website being poor. It is actually shockingly bad.
Take the news home page. Each link to a news story, instead of being a proper hyperlink in the <a href="..."> mould (like, you know, what you learnt in day 1 of webdesign class?), uses JavaScript with an <a href="#" onclick="...">. This is not very good practice when you’re using it to just launching popup windows, but when you’re launching links that are opened in the same window, it’s baffling. People with non-JS browsers can’t use it, you can’t open multiple pages in multiple tabs/windows, and it makes your site unsearchable by search engines (fatal in an era when Googlejuice is everything).
Furthermore, clicking on a link seems to load a redirect page first, then the page you actually loaded comes up. In IE at least, this badly breaks the back button - clicking back just sends you to the redirect page, which then sends you forward.
Both of these mistakes are elementary ones that bad websites made years ago, and since then the standards and usability movements had made good inroads into solving them (and arguing why we shouldn’t make these problems in the first place) - the Independent ought to have hired people with some knowledge of this, rather than someone who’s just flicked through JavaScript for Dummies…
Update: I delved a little deeper to try and understand why they did this - see this comment.
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November 6th, 2004 at 21:58:20
Let me see,
So instead of using normal links, which is sensible, they use javascript, which is not. The question is why do they do this, and I doubt it is because they are incompetent web designers - it is probably easier and quicker to not use javascript than to use it (although not being in the so-called bloggerati i wouldn’t know). Anyway, as a normal user the website doesn’t present me with any problems, apart from the 2-column thing, so stop complaining and stick to reading the guardian site, where the comments are free anyway.
November 7th, 2004 at 00:19:57
As a normal user, it presents me with problems. If I want to open links in a new tab with Ctrl-click in Firefox, then the Javascript means I open the index page in the new tab, while the current tab opens the page requested.
If that defines me as an abnormal user, then trying to navigate to the previous page certainly is normal, though. When I’m using IE, the client-side redirects break the back button.
Having looked a little at the JS code involved, it appears to be an ‘intelligent’ way of building the URL to navigate to, in particular handling whether to deliver the hi- or lo-res version of the site, depending on what the user has opted for. But this can be handled by building the links on the server side instead, which wouldn’t cause such silly grief.
November 7th, 2004 at 17:47:56
Back in the Indy’s pre-compact days, the rag was notorious for having really shit DTP and layout. It seems all those crap sub-editors have been exiled to the online department.
Not that there’s much of an audience for that site, surely? It doesn’t get anywhere near the hits that News Unlimited has, let alone the online Torygraph and the all-conquering BBC News Online monster…
That’s probably what The Independent’s management think too, so a half-arsed job is pretty much all they need to maintain a web presence. (More to do with preserving face than anything else, no doubt.) Which leaves the online news junky with one very loaded question - why bother?
November 8th, 2004 at 13:29:56
And now it appears to be broken!
November 10th, 2004 at 17:40:27
They seem to have replaced the javascript with real hyperlinks now - either that or I’m deranged.