adrian holovaty

June 30, 2002, 6:52 PM ET

'The scourge of Arial'

I just stumbled upon Mark Simonson's "The scourge of Arial", which outlines the history of that incredibly ugly font.

Makes for interesting reading. It turns out Arial was developed as a "look-alike" font based on Helvetica, one of the more popular/trendy fonts of the mid to late 20th Century. Font vendors created Arial to compete with Adobe, which licensed Helvetica in the early '80s. (Yes, that's much like creating a generic version of Cheerios.) The result? A lousy-looking rip off of a font that, according to the article, was out of style anyway.

After reading the article, I wondered how many news sites used Arial heavily, and whether the use/avoidance of Arial correlated in any way with site quality. After a quick, unscientific glance at the list of 2002 EPpy Award winners, I reached my unfortunate answer: 13 of the 20 award-winning sites use Arial in some way on their home pages. (Yuck!) Six use Arial extensively for navigation. (Double yuck!) And here's the killer: The site that won the award for "Best Design of a Newspaper Online Service," usatoday.com, uses Arial to an almost pain-inducing degree.

How disheartening. Just think of how much better those sites would look if they used a different font -- perhaps one designed for the screen, not one ripped off of a circa-1960 trend.

Comments (5) / Permalink

June 30, 2002, 3:03 PM ET

Comment system is up and running

I've finished version 1.0 of this blog's comment system.

Each blog entry now has a "Comments" link below it, along with the number of comments that already have been posted for that entry. If you're using a modern browser, clicking the link will dynamically display the comments below the blog entry, without having to reload the page. If you're not using a modern browser, clicking the link will load a new page with all of the comments.

If more than 5 comments have been posted on a particular entry, a new page will be loaded regardless of whether your browser is nifty. I did this to keep this site's bandwidth low (i.e., comments will only be preloaded if there are 5 or fewer).

I hope this fosters some good discussion. I've already received a few e-mails from people requesting this feature, so I'm very excited to see whether it catches on.

NOTE: I was inspired by Andrew Porter Glendinning's comment system. Mine is a little different -- no pop-up windows, more bandwidth-efficient, style differences -- but I figured I should give credit where credit is due.

Comments (6) / Permalink

June 28, 2002, 10:47 AM ET

OJR article on user registration

Online Journalism Review has posted a new article about the recent trend of requiring user registration to access news Web sites. Some culprits: The NYT, LA Times, and my hometown favorite, the Trib.

The article, written by J.D. Lasica (who publishes an excellent online-news-focused blog), explains the basic pros and cons of user registration and gives case studies of a few newspaper chains that do it.

The most interesting part was the article's last page, which raised concerns over privacy and personal data -- issues that have bugged me for quite some time. Why should I give the LA Times my income level? (I'm not the only person who's asked.) There seems to be a movement, if you want to call it that, to give bogus information to these things; count me in. I have long been a proponent of listing "1929" as my birth year and "hair care" as my occupation whenever prompted to enter such data. In most cases, there's no incentive for me to give sites valid information.

I'd like to point out something the article didn't mention: the potential for severe password security breaches. Since more and more news sites are requiring registration, users need to juggle more and more user names and passwords. Naturally, people don't want to have to remember 10 different passwords for 10 different news sites -- not to mention any other password-protected technologies in your life, like e-mail -- so it's convenient to use the same password wherever you go. (I'll admit it -- I've done this. And many people I know do the same.)

See where I'm headed with this? If someone is asked to choose a username/password and enter an e-mail address in a user-registration process (e.g. the New York Times'), what are the chances that the person's password for this site and his/her e-mail account password are the same? I'd bet it's very likely. ("Oh, they're asking me to choose a password. I'll just use the same one I always use...")

The result? The New York Times gets a database of e-mail addresses and passwords that very well might be the passwords to those same e-mail addresses. Kind of scary, and worth thinking about.

Comments (5) / Permalink

June 27, 2002, 4:43 PM ET

Web accessibility case studies

On his blog, Mark Pilgrim has been posting a continuing series of suggestions on how to improve the usability and accessibility of weblogs. A few snippets: He recommends using meaningful page titles, reminds us to make sure links are easily distinguished as such, and even touches on lesser-known concepts like putting your main content first. (Read the whole series here.)

Mark's examples are particularly charming because he includes character sketches of five people -- Jackie, Michael, Bill, Lillian and Marcus -- who each deal with a disability in a different way, and aren't able to use the traditional Web browsers that, unfortunately, the majority of Web sites cater to almost exclusively.

This series of postings was intended for bloggers, but I can't even begin to express how valuable these tips are to news sites. Yesterday, I spent a few moments checking out major news sites in Lynx, a text-only browser, and I was severely disheartened by the results. (I'll post screenshots later tonight, if I have time.) Most home pages were terrifying seas of spacer GIFs and nested tables, with nearly nonexistent structural integrity.

The problem is, these sites use all sorts of HTML hacks in order to position their content, when they could -- and should -- be using Cascading Style Sheets. Instead, users of text-only browsers are greeted with lines and lines of irrelevant (and unreadable) [spacer] placeholders that make the content pretty much unreadable.

It seems to me that, above almost any other Web content providers (with the possible exception of government), news outlets need to make their content accessible. As fond as journalists are of championing the common man and trumpeting access to information, it's a sad irony that the very proponents of "information for the masses" don't practice what they preach.

Comments (6) / Permalink

June 27, 2002, 9:13 AM ET

Pledging allegiance to e-mail forums

You know you're in the Bible Belt when...

Comments (2) / Permalink

June 26, 2002, 4:09 PM ET

A Flash of non-brilliance

Why was this USATODAY.com feature done in Flash?

I clicked through the feature several times, and I've determined Flash adds nothing to the presentation that couldn't be accomplished in JavaScript, or even normal HTML, other than the slow "fade-in" effect between subpages that, frankly, I don't want to wait for. The images are not animated, the text is not animated; what, then, is the point of rendering this graphic in an animation program?

There are only disadvantages. Flash hinders the content's accessibility: Anyone who uses a non-graphical browser isn't able to see any of this. We're lucky this isn't important information.

Note: I'm not sure whether this, the "USA TODAY Snapshots" graphic, is a daily feature on USATODAY.com, because I don't visit the site often. If it is, perhaps they take more advantage of the Flash format on some days and today was an exception. Still, that's no excuse for saying ignoring users who don't have access to Flash.

Comments (3) / Permalink

June 26, 2002, 9:27 AM ET

The best (and worst) online ad types

An interesting chart on Business 2.0 examines the different types of online ads (banner, pop-up, etc.) and how effective/annoying they are. The clear winner: text ads, which are, according to the chart, the least annoying and most effective.

A few comments:

I agree that text ads are best. I've been using the Internet since 1994, and I'm pretty sure I've only clicked on a banner ad once. (Cut me some slack. It was one of those stupid "punch the monkey" ads, back when nobody had ever seen anything like that before. To this day I regret it.) I have, however, clicked on text ads. Google does a decent job of giving you advertising based on your searches.

"Intrusive" is not a good thing. Two of the ad types on the chart give "intrusive" as one of their positive qualities. What the heck? I didn't get a degree in advertising, so I'm no expert on ad strategy, but to me that's a load of crap. "Intrusive" is not a positive quality. If a business wants to sell its products or services to me, it had better treat me nicely.

I'd be embarassed if I were LATimes.com. Sucks to be listed as a "check it out" example of pop-under ads. Gee, doesn't that just make you want to get your news there?

Comments (3) / Permalink

June 25, 2002, 9:59 PM ET

A note about standards-compliance

I've designed this blog in standards-compliant XHTML and cascading style sheets. That means the design will look cruddy for people who are using older browsers like Netscape 4.x.

If you're one of the folks using a non-compliant browser, please consider upgrading it to support Web standards. It's your chance to improve the future of the Web.

If you're curious about what all this means, look no further than this explanatory page.

Comments (4) / Permalink

June 25, 2002, 9:41 PM ET

We have liftoff

Finally, I've started my blog.

I've muddled over possible designs for the past God-knows-how-long. Then it took me a while to program the content-management system (my motto: do it yourself), but I daresay it's very nifty.

More features are coming soon. Many more. Right now I'm going to finish cooking dinner.

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