New Scottish Parliament website unCool

[David Marsh]

The new Scottish Parliament building has finally opened for business,
and to complement the opening comes a reworking of the Parliament's
website, http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/

Unfortunately, the new website is most definitely unCool.

"Cool URIs don't change" wrote no less a person than Sir Tim Berners-Lee,
but, if you bookmarked a document on the old Parliament website, such as,
say, the contact details for one of your local MSPs, is the web address
the same under the new design?

I'm sure you can guess the answer. But of course, the competent webteam
will have written back-end rewrite rules to seamlessly redirect the
visitor to the new URI? Nope, "Naw, couldnae find it", and not even a
friendly link back to the homepage so that you can attempt to continue
your search.

But our Parliamentary webteam will undoubtedly have taken the opportunity
of a rewrite to ensure the site conforms with web standards in order to
ensure compatibility with every possible browsing environment.
Unfortunately, the W3C validator disagrees.

And they'll not have engaged in anything as limiting as using expensive
and proprietary closed-format files not accessible to users of all
contemporary computers? Oh, those new MSP video interviews intended to
bring the MSPs closer to their constituents are only available in
"Windows Media" format, which is of little comfort if you're a user of a
system, handheld or smartphone which Microsoft doesn't deign to support,
and, being a closed format means that third-parties can't write
alternative players for it anyway.

Smart, successful Scotland this isn't.
--
David Marsh, <reply-to-email is valid at time of writing> |
Edinburgh, Scotland. [en, fr, (de)] | http://www.viewport.co.uk/ |

Please help me by correcting any errors in my foreign language posts!<
Please trim & interleave quotes otherwise your posts will not be read<

[Darin McGrew]

David Marsh <li*******@bogon.viewport.ukfsn.org.REMOVE-BOGON.invalid> wrote:

website, http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/

Unfortunately, the new website is most definitely unCool.

And inaccessible to many.

$ lynx -dump http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/
lynx -dump http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/

$

Government website ridiculed on USENET! News at eleven!
--
Darin McGrew, mc****@stanfordalumni.org, http://www.rahul.net/mcgrew/
Web Design Group, da***@htmlhelp.com, http://www.HTMLHelp.com/

"It said 'Insert disk #3', but only two will fit..."

[Andreas Prilop]

On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, David Marsh wrote:

The new Scottish Parliament building has finally opened for business,
and to complement the opening comes a reworking of the Parliament's
website, http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/

Not even http://www.bayern.de/ has anything like this:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/vli/language/scots/

Is this going to be the official language of the Republic of Scotland?
;-)

[Andy Dingley]

On Wed, 8 Sep 2004 00:26:17 -0000, David Marsh
<Th*****************@your.newsreader.may.be.broken > wrote:

Smart, successful Scotland this isn't.

UK government makes a bollocks of an IT project ? Now there's a
novelty.

I wonder which big-name consultancy got to over-charge enormously for
making this pile of garbage ?

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, Andy Dingley wrote:

UK government makes a bollocks of an IT project ? Now there's a
novelty.
Sad, really. The response to the perfectly obvious URL of
http://www.scottish.parliament.uk was enough to set the bogosity
alarms ringing. 200 OK and a link to somewhere else, ferchrissake.

TimBL describes what he calls the "Welcome page". I'd have to
categorise that as the "Unwelcome page". And -so- pointless!!!
I wonder which big-name consultancy got to over-charge enormously for
making this pile of garbage ?

Infinitesimal compared to the cost of the actual building, methinks.

Anyone up to producing an accessible gateway into their web site?[1]

And what sort of prize do they win for presenting an Arabic web page
in iso-8859-1 ? I suppose we should be grateful that Gaelic can be
done with the usual character repertoire - unlike Welsh.

sigh. Another triumph of spin over practicality.

[1] I'm not sure I've got the expertise and/or stamina to respond to the
resulting court actions.

[Shawn K. Quinn]

[I set followups to comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html since that's where
I'm following this]

begin quote from David Marsh in
<sl********************************@pepper.local.l an>:

The new Scottish Parliament building has finally opened for business,
and to complement the opening comes a reworking of the Parliament's
website, http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/
Hmm, just a link to home.htm under the same host, when home.htm could have
been made the index document on the server.

And I'm still waiting for home.htm to load. It's taking a very long time.
Looking at my Squid access logs, it seems the CSS files, among others, are
huge (something like 300K apiece!).

They use images for text (language names) which is a pretty bad idea. I'd
bet there are no ALT attributes there.

The home page tells me "No javascript enabled" for no good reason. Why not
just present the alternative content and shut up?

I could go on and on, before feeding the page to the validator (which I'm
not going to, as it appears others in the group already have).
And they'll not have engaged in anything as limiting as using expensive
and proprietary closed-format files not accessible to users of all
contemporary computers? Oh, those new MSP video interviews intended to
bring the MSPs closer to their constituents are only available in
"Windows Media" format, which is of little comfort if you're a user of a
system, handheld or smartphone which Microsoft doesn't deign to support,
and, being a closed format means that third-parties can't write
alternative players for it anyway.

This is a really boneheaded decision, especially in light of free
alternatives to Windows Media formats (Ogg Theora being the latest of them,
even MPEG-1 being more accessible than anything that will ever come out of
the overgrown slop factory in Redmond, WA, USA).

--
Shawn K. Quinn

[Neal]

On Wed, 8 Sep 2004 00:26:17 -0000, David Marsh
<Th*****************@your.newsreader.may.be.broken > wrote:

The new Scottish Parliament building has finally opened for business,
and to complement the opening comes a reworking of the Parliament's
website, http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/

Unfortunately, the new website is most definitely unCool.

But I like this little guy, bones and all.

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/nm...ament7_100.jpg

[Nick Kew]

[crosspost to uk.rec.cycling; relevant to very recent threads]

In article <sl********************************@pepper.local.l an>,
David Marsh <Th*****************@your.newsreader.may.be.broken > writes:

The new Scottish Parliament building has finally opened for business,
and to complement the opening comes a reworking of the Parliament's
website, http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/

Unfortunately, the new website is [chop - horribly broken]
Just a few days ago (earlier this month), someone posted a URL to
some material of the scottish parliament's all-party cycling group.
We (uk.rec.cycling collectively) were well-impressed with their
having presented an excellent summary of a subject (cycle helmets)
that is usually shrouded in prejudice and ignorance[1]. That URL[2]
is gone now, and the error message is useless.

I don't remember who originally posted the URLs. I can find the report,
but only because I've seen it and knew what to search for. I can't
find the page of the crossparty group responsible for that report,
either from a search or the sitemap. Whoever it was: was it originally
easy and intuitive to find, and can you find it again by a
similar process (i.e. without a search based on prior knowledge of
what to look for)?
Smart, successful Scotland this isn't.

So it would seem.

[1] Prejudice: "you're obviously safer cycling with a helmet"
Real Life: It's not at all clear, and those countries that have
introduced compulsion have seen at best no improvement, and at
worst a marked deterioration of cycling safety.
[2] http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/cr...commentary.pdf

--
Nick Kew

Nick's manifesto: http://www.htmlhelp.com/~nick/

[Richard Watson]

ni**@hugin.webthing.com (Nick Kew) writes:

That URL[2]
is gone now, and the error message is useless.
[2] http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/cr...commentary.pdf

Maybe someone should suggest:

Redirect /crossparty http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/cr...Groups/groups/

or whatever the equivalent is in "Oracle Web Listener" speak.

--
Richard Watson
http://www.opencolo.com/
High Quality, Value for money colocation

[Malcolm]

In article <2h********************************@4ax.com>, Andy Dingley
<di*****@codesmiths.com> writes

On Wed, 8 Sep 2004 00:26:17 -0000, David Marsh
<Th*****************@your.newsreader.may.be.broke n> wrote:

Smart, successful Scotland this isn't.

UK government makes a bollocks of an IT project ? Now there's a
novelty.

What has the UK government got do with it?

--
Malcolm

[Mike Quin]

In article <o8************@webthing.com>, Nick Kew wrote:

I don't remember who originally posted the URLs. I can find the report,
but only because I've seen it and knew what to search for. I can't
find the page of the crossparty group responsible for that report,
either from a search or the sitemap. Whoever it was: was it originally
easy and intuitive to find, and can you find it again by a
similar process (i.e. without a search based on prior knowledge of
what to look for)?

Home -> MSPs -> Cross Party -> List of Cross Party Groups -> Cycling

Possibly intuitive if you know about cross-party groups, possibly not.

--
Mike Quin

[jtaylor]

Nick Kew <ni**@hugin.webthing.com> wrote in message
news:o8************@webthing.com...

[crosspost to uk.rec.cycling; relevant to very recent threads]

In article <sl********************************@pepper.local.l an>,
David Marsh <Th*****************@your.newsreader.may.be.broken > writes:

The new Scottish Parliament building has finally opened for business,
and to complement the opening comes a reworking of the Parliament's
website, http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/

Unfortunately, the new website is [chop - horribly broken]

Just a few days ago (earlier this month), someone posted a URL to
some material of the scottish parliament's all-party cycling group.
We (uk.rec.cycling collectively) were well-impressed with their
having presented an excellent summary of a subject (cycle helmets)
that is usually shrouded in prejudice and ignorance[1]. That URL[2]
is gone now, and the error message is useless.

Google "scottish parliament cycle helmets" and it's the third link (today).
If you pick "view as html" then google's internal copy comes up.

If this does not work I saved a copy; interested readers may apply.

[Just zis Guy, you know?]

jtaylor wrote:

Google "scottish parliament cycle helmets" and it's the third link
(today). If you pick "view as html" then google's internal copy comes
up.
If this does not work I saved a copy; interested readers may apply.

Or just click the link on
http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/ms.../cpg-cycle.htm

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington
University

[Andreas Prilop]

On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, Alan J. Flavell wrote:

And what sort of prize do they win for presenting an Arabic web page
in iso-8859-1 ?

Arabic? What Arabic?
http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/vl...ic/gifs/01.gif

--
Top-posting.
What's the most irritating thing on Usenet?

[Eric Jarvis]

Andreas Prilop nh******@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de wrote:

On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, Alan J. Flavell wrote:

And what sort of prize do they win for presenting an Arabic web page
in iso-8859-1 ?

Arabic? What Arabic?
http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/vl...ic/gifs/01.gif

It's upsetting. I particularly like the two blue underlined sections. It
is SO easy to do Arabic properly, there simply isn;t any excuse. I can
almost accept problems doing some of the Indian languages properly, since
support for some of the glyphs is apparently patchy with some of them.
Arabic, however, is well supported and has been for a long time.

My local authority has a site that at one point did ALL the translations
as gifs. They've moved on, and I haven't looked at the site in the few
months since my last tirade at them, so perhaps they've fixed it. I'm not
betting on it though.

Globalisation is no longer the future, it's been the present for several
years. The UK's reluctance to deal effectively with any language other
than English is already causing us to get left behind. We've got a huge
pool of people who are native speakers of an enormous range of languages,
and we can't get past seeing them as a problem.
--
eric
www.ericjarvis.co.uk
all these years I've waited for the revolution
and all we end up getting is spin

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, Andreas Prilop wrote:

On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, Alan J. Flavell wrote:

And what sort of prize do they win for presenting an Arabic web page
in iso-8859-1 ?

Arabic? What Arabic?

Sorry - that was a brain-check on my part. The page that I had
-really- been looking at in "iso-8859-1 coding" was the Chinese one.
but by the time I posted my comment, I was so overwhelmed[1] by the
whole site that I got confused about which language was which.

I'll try to do better next time...

[1] screen shot of menu bar:
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/tests/bar.jpg

[Dr John Stockton]

JRS: In article <sl********************************@pepper.local.l an>,
dated Wed, 8 Sep 2004 00:26:17, seen in news:comp.infosystems.www.author
ing.html, David Marsh <Th*****************@your.newsreader.may.be.brok en

posted : The new Scottish Parliament building has finally opened for business,
and to complement the opening comes a reworking of the Parliament's
website, http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/

Has it been drawn to the attention of the various bodies, European,
British or Scottish, interested in access for the disabled - in
particular, those which are not themselves organs of the UK or SC
governments?

Has it been drawn to the attention of MSPs for Remote Parts, where
broad-band is a dream for most? To MSPs of parties not affiliated to
the regnant government? To the local Press?

--
© John Stockton, Surrey, UK. ?@merlyn.demon.co.uk Turnpike v4.00 MIME. ©
Web <URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/> - FAQish topics, acronyms, & links.
Plaintext, quoting : see <URL:http://www.usenet.org.uk/ukpost.html>
Do not Mail News to me. Before a reply, quote with ">" or "> " (SoRFC1036)

[Andy Dingley]

On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 12:03:52 +0100, Malcolm
<Ma*****@indaal.demon.co.uk> wrote:

What has the UK government got do with it?

Because Scotland is still part of the UK, and as such this
"parliament" is still no more than a joke.

[Malcolm]

In article <9m********************************@4ax.com>, Andy Dingley
<di*****@codesmiths.com> writes

On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 12:03:52 +0100, Malcolm
<Ma*****@indaal.demon.co.uk> wrote:

What has the UK government got do with it?

Because Scotland is still part of the UK, and as such this
"parliament" is still no more than a joke.

What has the UK government got to do with the Scottish Parliament
website?

--
Malcolm

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, Malcolm wrote:

What has the UK government got to do with the Scottish Parliament website?

Interesting question. Is disability access a devolved matter?

[Andreas Prilop]

On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, David Marsh wrote:

The new Scottish Parliament building has finally opened for business,
and to complement the opening comes a reworking of the Parliament's
website, http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/

Unfortunately, the new website is most definitely unCool.

Why is it that a parliament in the UK presents ifself in Panjabi,
which is a *regional*, not national language in India and Pakistan,
and in Catalan, which is a *regional*, not national language in Spain,
but not in Welsh?

[Andy Mabbett]

In message <qb**************@indaal.demon.co.uk>, Malcolm
<Ma*****@indaal.demon.co.uk> writes

Because Scotland is still part of the UK, and as such this
"parliament" is still no more than a joke.

What has the UK government got to do with the Scottish Parliament
website?

AFAIAA, The SP is required (sic) to adhere to UK Government standards
for websites.
--
Andy Mabbett

Say "NO!" to compulsory ID Cards: <http://www.no2id.net/>

[Andy Mabbett]

In message <Pi*******************************@ppepc56.ph.gla. ac.uk>,
Alan J. Flavell <fl*****@ph.gla.ac.uk> writes

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk

A picture of Sean Connery has the alt text "the chamber in session"...

--
Andy Mabbett

Say "NO!" to compulsory ID Cards: <http://www.no2id.net/>

[Dr John Stockton]

JRS: In article <W9**************@pigsonthewing.org.uk>, dated Sun, 12
Sep 2004 20:01:22, seen in news:comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html,
Andy Mabbett <us**********@pigsonthewing.org.uk> posted :

In message <qb**************@indaal.demon.co.uk>, Malcolm
<Ma*****@indaal.demon.co.uk> writes

Because Scotland is still part of the UK, and as such this
"parliament" is still no more than a joke.

What has the UK government got to do with the Scottish Parliament
website?

AFAIAA, The SP is required (sic) to adhere to UK Government standards
for websites.

Does the UK Government do so?

--
© John Stockton, Surrey, UK. ?@merlyn.demon.co.uk DOS 3.3, 6.20; Win98. ©
Web <URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/> - FAQqish topics, acronyms & links.
PAS EXE TXT ZIP via <URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/programs/00index.htm>
My DOS <URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/batfiles.htm> - also batprogs.htm.

[Andy Mabbett]

In message <HZ**************@merlyn.demon.co.uk>, Dr John Stockton
<sp**@merlyn.demon.co.uk> writes

What has the UK government got to do with the Scottish Parliament
website?

AFAIAA, The SP is required (sic) to adhere to UK Government standards
for websites.

Does the UK Government do so?

Sometimes.
--
Andy Mabbett

Say "NO!" to compulsory ID Cards: <http://www.no2id.net/>

[red]

hi, how much has your council tax gone up since scotland got its assembly,
and should we in the north east of england vote yes for our assembly

"David Marsh" <Th*****************@your.newsreader.may.be.broken > wrote in
message news:sl********************************@pepper.loc al.lan...

The new Scottish Parliament building has finally opened for business,
and to complement the opening comes a reworking of the Parliament's
website, http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/

Unfortunately, the new website is most definitely unCool.

"Cool URIs don't change" wrote no less a person than Sir Tim Berners-Lee,
but, if you bookmarked a document on the old Parliament website, such as,
say, the contact details for one of your local MSPs, is the web address
the same under the new design?

I'm sure you can guess the answer. But of course, the competent webteam
will have written back-end rewrite rules to seamlessly redirect the
visitor to the new URI? Nope, "Naw, couldnae find it", and not even a
friendly link back to the homepage so that you can attempt to continue
your search.

But our Parliamentary webteam will undoubtedly have taken the opportunity
of a rewrite to ensure the site conforms with web standards in order to
ensure compatibility with every possible browsing environment.
Unfortunately, the W3C validator disagrees.

And they'll not have engaged in anything as limiting as using expensive
and proprietary closed-format files not accessible to users of all
contemporary computers? Oh, those new MSP video interviews intended to
bring the MSPs closer to their constituents are only available in
"Windows Media" format, which is of little comfort if you're a user of a
system, handheld or smartphone which Microsoft doesn't deign to support,
and, being a closed format means that third-parties can't write
alternative players for it anyway.

Smart, successful Scotland this isn't.
--
David Marsh, <reply-to-email is valid at time of writing> |
Edinburgh, Scotland. [en, fr, (de)] | http://www.viewport.co.uk/ |

Please help me by correcting any errors in my foreign language posts!<
Please trim & interleave quotes otherwise your posts will not be read<