Over the last few years, video has become more and more commonplace on the Web, usually using Flash (other plugins, Quicktime et al., seem to be fading into obscurity).

I absolutely bloody hate this. There’s a number of reasons; firstly, Flash is a proprietary format (as are almost all the other formats commonly used for video; the non-proprietary ones are still exceedingly rare). That means that if I’m to view these videos I’m at the mercy of the proprietary developer. In practice, that means I can’t view these videos on my desktop computer, as I run an operating system that Adobe choose not to bother supporting (FreeBSD). I’m not willing to stop using the operating system I prefer just to watch the occasional video.

Secondly, I’m impatient. I want to get the information at my own pace. I want to speed up if necessary, or slow down. This is easy in text; less so with video. At best, it’s inconvenient, and with streaming video it may not even be possible to skip forward. It’s often also difficult to find the exact point in the video you’re looking for; in a text, there’s almost certainly a Find function. (Related: I probably can’t watch a video at university or at work, even if it’s relevant to what I’m doing, if I don’t have headphones with me. If I need the information, I’d have to wait until I got home then do work-related stuff there — no, thanks.)

Thirdly, and while this doesn’t affect me personally, it most likely affects many more people than the other two: accessibility. If you’re relying on videos to promote your cause, you’re excluding blind people (if the visual content is important) and/or deaf people (if the audio content is important). A textual version, with images if necessary (and descriptions of the images if possible) is usable by both blind and deaf people (with a screen reader if necessary).

If it’s the presentation that matters — a work of art, for example — then by all means use video if that’s what you want to use. If it’s the content that matters, however, if you want people to buy your product, or become involved in your project, or support your cause, then by using video to the exclusion of more accessible formats, you are limiting your audience; how is that at all productive when you’re trying to promote something?

(An addendum: I’m not necessarily saying you shouldn’t use video at all, though I’d not mind. But you absolutely should provide an alternative version if at all possible, for people for whom video is problematic.)

1. Just because you believe something doesn’t mean it’s true.
2. Just because lots of people believe something doesn’t mean it’s true.
3. Just because you believe the world would be a terrible place if something isn’t true, doesn’t mean it’s true.
4. Just because somebody very intelligent believes something, doesn’t mean it’s true (for example: Isaac Newton believed in alchemy).
   • This is particularly pertinent in arguments about religion; religionists are wont to point out that various famous scientists were (or were supposedly) Christians. Their religion doesn’t make their scientific discoveries any more or less valid, and their scientific discoveries don’t make their religion any more or less valid.
5. Just because something was believed by someone whom you consider to be good or bad, doesn’t make the thing in itself good or bad (example: Hitler was a vegetarian and opposed to smoking). This is a generalisation of the previous point.
6. Just because two things happen (together, or one after the other) does not mean that they are related. For example:
   1. A child showing symptoms of autism after being given the MMR vaccine; however, an autistic child would show symptoms at about this time anyway; this ignores other possible causes.
   2. Just because vegetarians or vegans are more healthy than meat-eaters (something often claimed in favour of vegetarianism) does not prove that vegetarianism/veganism is more healthy — there could be other reasons for the difference.
7. Science may not always get the right answer, but it has a better rate of success than making stuff up and hoping for the best. There’s a reason for that.

Two things that really bug me are images that have alt text when they shouldn’t (ones that are purely decorative and don’t add anything to the page) and ones that don’t when they should.

The first is annoying, because when I’m using a text-only browser (which is most of the time, except at work) this type of image just clutters up the page. A common sub-case is having a blank alt attribute (alt="") which is presumably meant to hide the image from text-only browsers or screenreaders; I’ve added a hook in ELinks to filter these out.

The second is annoying, because these are images that I might want to see, but having no alt text makes this needlessly difficult.

A particularly egregious example is Wikipedia, where thumbnails have a blank alt, and so don’t show up even though they’re relevant to the content of the page, but the surrounding anchor element has the relevant description in its title attribute. What on earth!? Why does this make sense? Obviously the developers realise this information is useful, so they put it in the page, but not in the place where it would be most useful.

It’s not a difficult concept: if an image is relevant to the content of the page, it needs a description in the alt attribute. If it’s not relevant, it should probably be defined via CSS anyway, or left out altogether (either way, I won’t see it).

For most of the last 9 months, I’ve been working on a project called InterRisk; specifically, developing a web portal for viewing scientific data overlaid on a map. (The scientific data is marine-related, in our case mostly to do with algae levels around the UK and Irish coast). Anyway, most of the coding has been in Javascript; there was some PHP, but I’m trying to avoid it, and any new server-side code will probably be in Python because it’s awesome.

Before I started, I’d done very little javascript, just a few toy programs and whatnot. Mostly my experience of it was through bloody annoying websites that use it unnecessarily.

What I’ve learned, though, is that it’s actually a reasonably decent language — yes, it has some misfeatures, and some things don’t behave as I think they should (for (i in object), for example, which sets i to the index of the member, not the member itself like in python or sh). They’re fairly minor, though, in my opinion, compared to some of the good features, like functions being first-class objects that you can pass around, for example as event handlers. (I know that quite a few languages can do this, but it was a surprise to learn that Javascript could).

The real spoiler, though, is browsers. If I could write an application that only had to support one browser, I’d be reasonably happy. At least, if the browser in question wasn’t Internet Explorer. The variability in javascript support in the various browsers, though, is a serious issue; there are so many features that just can’t be used because Internet Explorer 6 still needs to be supported (or even IE7, which as far as I know has almost identical javascript support to IE6). I don’t know if IE8 will be an improvement, but it’s hardly important — it’ll be years before IE6/7 are sufficiently rare to make using newer features safe in a portable application (mostly because there are organisations still using IE6, after more than two years — I understand the arguments for not rolling out new software immediately, especially in large corporate environments, but two years? What the hell are you doing?).

(There is a bright side — as I have no access to any IE6 machine at work, I have an excellent excuse not to support it. As mentioned, I don’t think it makes a difference where javascript is concerned, but it’s one less thing to worry about.)

Even discounting Internet Explorer for the moment, things aren’t perfect; I’ve run into problems because, for example, Firefox allows things that Opera doesn’t, when Opera’s behaviour is actually the correct behaviour (but of course, I can’t code to Opera’s strict standards-compliance, because discounting Internet Explorer was only wishful thinking, and IE7 doesn’t support the correct way of doing things that Opera mandates).

Not supporting large chunks of the DOM (DOM level 2 or 3, if I remember correctly) is okay, though, because I can just extend the Node object to provide wrappers — if getElementByTagNameNS isn’t defined, fake it using getElementByTagName instead. But oh, wait, Internet Explorer doesn’t let you extend the built-in DOM objects. Why? No idea, but it means that I have to write a wrapper function for every browser to use, even if it supports the necessary methods natively. So much for that plan.

Then, when something goes wrong — and it will — you’re sort of stuffed. While Firefox has Firebug, which isn’t perfect but does the job well enough, and Opera has Dragonfly which was great while it worked but seems to have broken for me, Internet Explorer has…nothing. As far as I know. Extensive Googling has, at least, turned up nothing. IE7 seems to have only about two or three javascript error messages anyway (which at least is more than ed, which makes do with one — ? — but they aren’t much more helpful), so it’s back to alert() and popping up the value of variables at a dozen different points throughout the application. (I assume Microsoft expect people to fork out for Visual Studio or something to get access to a debugger. Sod that, all I want is useful error messages and a DOM inspector)

Anyway, this has turned into more of an Internet Explorer rant than a Javascript rant. As I mentioned, no browser is perfect, but some are less perfect than others, and as Internet Explorer is still ⅔ of the browser market, it’s proportionately more of an issue than Opera or Safari, or even Firefox, would be if their javascript implementation was as poor.

Update: Simon points out that IE8 does no better on the Acid3 test than IE7, but suggested the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar from Microsoft; I’ve not yet had a chance to test it.

The USA has plenty of prominent fundamentalists in important positions, but for the most part the UK has seemed to avoid it. Except in Northern Ireland, where apparently the government is full of them. For example, Mervyn Storey, who threatened the Ulster Museum in Belfast with legal action if they went ahead with an exhibition on evolution, because apparently it’s discrimination.

Yep, because some people don’t believe in it, it’s discriminatory to even talk about it.

"They could be subject to a legal challenge under equality legislation within Northern Ireland if they chose to ignore alternative views that many people here in the Province believe in," he said.

Firstly, it is not required for a museum to put on exhibitions about everything under the sun. I’d be surprised if the exhibition didn’t talk about alternative theories at all, but the exhibition is focusing on evolution.

The bit which pisses me off the most:

…and let’s stress it is still only a theory…

"Only a theory" demonstrates that he has no clue what a theory is; for a start, I’m not even convinced that creationism/intelligent-design are even theories at all. According to the United States National Academy of Sciences:

A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. Such fact-supported theories are not "guesses" but reliable accounts of the real world.

Creationism and "Intelligent Design" are not, by that definition, theories. They’re simply statements that this is how the world works. At best, they start with the assumption that God exists and then look for evidence to support that belief. That is not science.

(The National Academy of Sciences goes on to say "The theory of biological evolution is more than "just a theory." It is as factual an explanation of the universe as the atomic theory of matter or the germ theory of disease. Our understanding of gravity is still a work in progress. But the phenomenon of gravity, like evolution, is an accepted fact"; that is, we know evolution happens, just like we know gravity happens; we just don’t quite understand all the details as to why.)

Cycling home yesterday I was overtaken by a taxi in a bus lane, which was unexpected (I was one lane to the right, approaching Charles Cross roundabout). When I got home, I did a bit of googling to find out whether taxis are allowed in bus lanes (apparently yes, depending on the bus lane). While doing so, I came across this site.

The page is titled "How to appeal unfair bus lane tickets", which seems perfectly reasonable. However, as far as I can tell, the actual meaning is "How to get out of paying perfectly legitimate tickets". Some examples of "non-compliant bus lanes" are given, including one where the sign is invalid because the bus doesn’t look right (actually, it looks like the sign has been vandalised, so some of the bus’s windows are missing), and one where the road markings are incorrect because it says "bus and cycle lane" which is only permitted for contra-flow bus lanes.

Now, I’m sure some people who get ticketed for driving in a bus lane honestly thought that it was permitted — another example they show doesn’t have a sign at all (though it still has the bright red road markings), so I’ll accept that people make mistakes. On the other hand, I would’ve thought people would err on the side of caution, and not drive in the bus lane unless they know it’s permitted; I suspect that anyone who resorts to arguing "oh but the cycle symbol and the word taxi were the wrong way around on the sign" (another of their examples) knew they weren’t permitted to drive there and are just trying to wriggle out of their punishment.

Another example they give is of yellow lines, which apparently must end in a bar at 90 degrees to the line. Apparently, one person who tried to appeal a ticket on the grounds that the line did not end in a bar and was hence invalid, lost his case; the adjudicator stated that "it cannot possibly be said that Mr Minier or any other motorist would be misled or confused by the absence of T-bars". Ticketfighter replies: "Confused or not is not the point, the line does not comply with the regulations and so therefore is not valid." Yet another example is of Controlled Zone signs, where apparently the words must be above the No Parking symbol — "Most people wouldn’t even realise something so simple would be grounds for an appeal!" Yes, because it’s trivial and petty.

If the ticket is unfair, by all means appeal. As far as I can tell, though, this site is aimed at people who want to ignore the rules but get upset when they’re punished for it.

To anybody writing a web form that asks for my country — or, for that matter, anybody else referring to it in any way:

I am a citizen of, and resident in, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It is perfectly acceptable, and even encouraged, to abbreviate this to "United Kingdom". (Historical note: before 1927, it was officially the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; in practice, the Irish Free State was independent from 1922.)

I am not a citizen of Great Britain. There is no such country, and has not been since 1801.

I am not a citizen of England. There is no such country, and has not been since 1707.

Of course, Great Britain still exists within the UK, and England within Great Britain. They are not countries, though. Americans, especially, should take note that referring to the UK as "Britain" has been wrong for almost 208 years.

No part of Ireland has ever been in Great Britain. Referring to Northern Ireland as part of Great Britain is always wrong, both geographically and politically. It’s not likely to win you any friends, either.

No part of Scotland or Wales have ever been in England, with the exception of minor border changes. Referring to them as such is (almost) always wrong, and also unlikely to win you any friends.

Finally, there hasn’t been a king or queen of England since 1604, when James I/VI changed the title to "…of Great Britain". Technically, after that point both England and Scotland were ruled by the King (or Queen) of Great Britain, though they remained seperate countries until 1707 (in personal union).

Not difficult, is it?

From an ad in Computing magazine: "BT and the NHS are teaming up to improve the quality of London’s community healthcare blah blah blah."

What for? Since when does London have a lack of adequate healthcare? The NHS site for Cornwall lists three hospitals with A&E departments — two of which aren’t even in Cornwall (Barnstaple and Plymouth). The only one actually in Cornwall is the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro. Devon’s not much better: apart from Barnstaple and Plymouth, there’s Exeter and Torquay — and another listed which is in Taunton. I didn’t check Somerset, but I doubt they’re much better off.

There’s plenty of places in Devon and Cornwall that are thirty or forty miles from an A&E department, yet London needs better healthcare. Hmm…

So I happened to visit the website of my old school, St. Aidan’s RC School and Language College. They have a nice fancy graphic at the top of the page which includes their motto, "We believe that God has created each person to celebrate life to the full".

Or rather, "to celeberate life to the full". I realise that standards are dropping, but this is just embarrassing — especially considering their status as a so-called "language college".

Update 2008-05-14: I emailed them last night, just after posting, and they seem to have corrected it pretty sharpish.

It’s that time of year again; I’ve got two exams coming up, plus one I’ve already taken. Not as many as some people, but still. Of course, life would be much easier if not for the fact that the only way to find this out was by getting the list of exams and grepping for modules I’m taking. Despite having spent craploads of money on the new portal, the exam timetable is a big HTML file containing a list of every exam in every faculty. Last year, it was an Excel spreadsheet. Is this progress?

The thing is, the portal knows what modules you’re enrolled on; surely there’s some way of telling it "this module has this exam", and then having it notify people as appropriate?