adrian holovaty

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October 31, 2002, 12:33 PM ET

Pull-quotes on Web pages

Following up on the outstanding discussion about page titles on news articles, here's another topic suggested to me by Ben: Pull-quotes on Web news stories.

Should we even bother? Do people actually look at those things?

Research findings are somewhat contradictory.

It's common knowledge that users scan Web pages instead of reading them word by word. That implies pull-quotes are a good thing, because they draw a scanning eye's attention.

In contrast, other research -- most notably the Stanford-Poynter EyeTracking Online News study -- shows that users' eyes fixate on text instead of graphics. That implies pull-quotes, which are more graphical elements than textual content, are ignored.

With that in mind, I'll conveniently side-step the issue of whether pull-quotes are effective online. (Personally, I think they're a waste of space and bandwidth; but I see how some people might think they're useful.) Instead, what I'd like to point out is their inaccessibility. Web pull-quotes generally are designed with no consideration given to non-graphical browsers.

For an example, see the recent BBC News article "Virtual hands reach across the ocean," which has a pull-quote toward the end of the story:

Screenshot of BBC News pull-quote

It looks pretty in the graphical browsers most people are used to using. But call up the page in the text-only Lynx browser, and here's what you'll see:

Net delays

In the ground-breaking experiment the participants are sharing a view of a virtual room containing a large black box. Their task - to work together to lift the black box despite being separated by the Atlantic.

It enhances the sense of being together even though the physical distances involved are vast

Professor Mel Slater

One of the big problems the experimenters had to overcome was the delay caused by sending data over the net.

See how the quote innocently makes its way into the article? A user reading this article in Lynx -- or via other text-only browser or screen reader -- probably won't be able to tell that this is an outside quote. It looks like it's part of the story, not an interruption in story flow.

Now, before I go further, I should point out the BBC does make accessible, text-only versions of all its pages. (Here's a text-only version of the above article, which does not include the pull-quote.) I chose the above example because it precisely shows why there is a need for the alternate versions the BBC is kind enough to provide.

That said, if your publication doesn't have the resources to create an alternate site, how could we make the above pull-quote more accessible?

My suggestion is to use a "skip" link, as explained in Day 11 of the Dive Into Accessibility series. It's as simple as providing an inner-page link before the quote and pointing that link to the content just after the quote ends. Like so:

<p>This is the first sentence in the story.</p>
<a href="#skipquote">Continue reading story</a>
<table align="right">
<!-- code for pull-quote goes here -->
</table>
<p><a name="skipquote">This</a> is the second sentence in the story.</p>

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October 30, 2002, 11:45 AM ET

Link abundance gives false illusion of completeness

In "News Sites Need To Go On Diets," Editor and Publisher columnist Steve Outing says: "The mistake at too many news sites is to overload the home page to demonstrate how much you've got." The column points to Google as an ideal example of simplicity, as previously discussed on this weblog.

A negative side-effect of displaying too many headlines on a news home page is the tendency for users to assume the home page is a complete index of all the site's content. Here are two problems with that:

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October 28, 2002, 2:09 PM ET

csmonitor.com offers syndication feeds

This just in: The Christian Science Monitor now offers syndication feeds in RSS format.

Twelve feeds are available, from topical feeds such as "Top Stories" and "Sci / Tech" to the broader "Entire Paper by Section."

The latter is particularly notable because, to my knowledge, it's the first time a major news site has made its entire contents available in a single public RSS feed. In early September, BBC News made select topical feeds available, but the site stopped short of syndicating everything.

The Monitor's Joel Abrams, Partnership Development Specialist, had this to tell me:

I'm really excited by this -- this is such a great, almost-zero-cost [way] to reach new people.

A few thoughts: I forget where I first saw the comparison of news aggregators to Napster, but it definitely applies: content is going to get out there and be aggregated, outside of its original context. A few people in our organization were a bit scared by that. But unlike Napster, the publisher still benefits from users coming to the web site and reading the whole story. And publishing in RSS seems a great way to get that elusive mindshare of users.

And this is just a start. Joel also told me there will be "a lot more coming in the next month or two." According to the site's syndication page, readers should expect "RSS feeds for news briefs, MonitorBlog, Daily Update, and more."

Outstanding.

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October 28, 2002, 1:32 PM ET

Oops: 'Blocked' parts of PDF file still accessible

Here's a classic example of why online journalists would do well to learn the intricacies of the technology they use.

Last week, washingtonpost.com posted a PDF file of a letter apparently written by the suspected DC-area sniper. Because the letter contained a few sensitive details, such as credit card account information, parts of the PDF file were blacked out electronically.

But The Post, or whoever made the PDF file, neglected to realize the blacked-out areas are easily removed with the proper tools.

Planet PDF points out the full version of Adobe Acrobat allows users to move the blacked-out areas around. According to the article, The Post's PDF file is "simply an image file to which an added layer of black has been added." Thus, one could simply open the document in Acrobat and drag the black layers away to reveal the hidden information.

It's not necessarily The Post's direct fault; they might have received the document, pre-blackened, from a source. But even if that were the case, the newspaper should have taken the time to ensure the sensitive information was properly blocked. Digital technology or not, you've got to cover your bases.

If Post staff members were uncomfortable with PDF documents, they could have converted the letter to a GIF or JPEG image file. Doing so would have guaranteed security -- and eliminated the need for users to download a third-party browser extension (Adobe Acrobat Reader) to view the document.

(Thanks to E-Media Tidbits for this story.)

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October 26, 2002, 11:00 PM ET

Searching for the 5 W's

Googlism uses Google to give you one-sentence answers on "who," "what," "where" or "when" a particular term is.

Most of it is silly. For example, a "who" search for "Paul McCartney" results in a wacky list of descriptions ranging from "paul mccartney is a great musician" to "paul mccartney is a futile gesture." Whatever that means.

But some of it is dead-on. For example, a "who" search for my name returns this single result:

adrian holovaty is assistant database editor and product developer at the atlanta journal

Not bad at all -- especially for something created just to be a "fun tool."

I mention this site (which I heard about via Simon Willison) because I think this technology, when improved, would be an intuitive way to get news. It'd be great to be able to do, say, a "who" search for "Alan Greenspan" or a "what" search for "World Series," and get a results page with meaningful content instead of a laundry list of article links.

For the "Alan Greenspan" search, perhaps the result page would give a short biography of Mr. Greenspan, plus a short summary of how he has been in the news lately. (With links to more detailed stories, of course.)

For the "World Series" search, perhaps you'd get a synopsis of the baseball series so far, with historical information and, again, links to more in-depth content.

The questions that Googlism lets you pose, and the questions that news stories address, are a natural fit. Journalists in the audience will note "who," "what," "where" and "when" are four of the somewhat cliché five W's and one H -- the questions that effective news stories should answer. (The remaining two questions are "why" and "how," but those are beyond the scope of a simple text-search engine, for now.)

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October 25, 2002, 5:41 PM ET

Page titles on news article pages

Ben e-mailed me a slew of questions regarding page titles on news article pages. (Page titles are the words displayed in the browser window's titlebar and in most search results). I'll attempt to tackle Ben's questions here and try to figure out a "best practice" for news sites to follow. Of course, feel free to chip in by posting a comment below.

First, here's my philosophy on exactly what titles on news sites should accomplish: A good news article page title succinctly explains the page's content -- and how that content fits into the big picture of the site.

So how can we accomplish this? First, let's look at what sites are already doing. Here are a number of different approaches, with a few example titles:

Headline only

Site name, headline

Site name, section, headline

Headline, site name

Site name, headline, date

Site name, date, headline

Print publication name, site name, headline

Whew. Not too much consistency throughout the industry. So which approach is best? Let's tackle the pieces of information one at a time:

Site name

Think about this from a user's perspective.

Say you bookmark a few New York Times articles about the sniper shootings. Then you bookmark a few articles on the same topic from the Washington Post, and a few others from USA Today and the BBC.

Now let's say it's a day later, and you'd like to go back to a particular one of those stories. Will it be easier to remember the story by its headline, or by its publication name? (Keep in mind these are all articles on the same topic, so it's likely they'll have similar headlines.)

I'm betting you'll remember the story by publication. A headline alone most likely wouldn't be enough to remind you which bookmark link to click.

Same goes for search results from an external search engine; a site name in the title gives extra context to a search result. It's not only good branding; it also helps give weight and credibility to a particular search result by disclosing the publication's name upfront.

Verdict: Yes, include it.

Site section

It may make sense from a navigational standpoint, but I think sections are better left out. If a headline is descriptive enough, the section is redundant.

Verdict: No, don't include it.

Date

Because the date (e.g., timeliness) is such an important part of a news story, I venture to say yes. But page titles can only be so long before they get unwieldy. For that reason, I'd advise to leave dates out.

An exception: Dates that are fundamentally tied to content. For example, something like a "Quote of the day" page. It wouldn't make sense to put the quote itself in the page title; rather, the date would work well.

Verdict: No, don't include it -- unless absolutely necessary.

Name of print publication

As I mention above, sacbee.com does this. I think it's redundant and a waste of precious title space. If a page's title already includes the site's name, there's absolutely no logical reason to include the print publication's name as well.

Verdict: No, no, no! Avoid this, as long as the page title already includes the site name.

Priorities

So, how does this fit together? I've determined all that really needs to be included in a news site's title page is the site name and headline. But which is more important?

For the answer to this question, look no further than Jakob Nielsen's "Marginalia of Web Design" and "Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines." A snippet from the latter:

Make the first word an important, information-carrying one. Results in better position in alphabetized lists and facilitates scanning. For example, start with the name of the company, person, or concept discussed in an article.

Do not make all page titles start with the same word: they will be hard to differentiate when scanning a list. Move common markers toward the end of the line. For example, the title of this page is Microcontent: Headlines and Subject Lines (Alertbox Sept. 1998).

With that in mind, it appears the best solution is "headline, site name" -- the technique used by washingtonpost.com. That lets users scan a list of titles easily while retaining the site's name for purposes of branding and familiarity.

Before I finish, a few more points...

Internal search engines

One of Ben's questions was whether to optimize page titles for internal or external search engines. My answer: Do both. Optimize titles for external search engines, such as Google, but display just the headline for an internal search engine. After all, a decent configurable internal search engine should be able to display whatever you want.

An example of this technique is this very site. Results from my own search engine display blog entry headlines, while page titles are preceded with "holovaty.com." (Note that I'll be changing my site's title scheme shortly, in the spirit of following my own guidelines.)

Multi-page articles

It's important to differentiate page titles when an article is spread over more than one page. For an example of what not to do, check out this article:

Each part of the article has the same page title. It'd be better if the page number was included in the title.

Punctuation / character separators

Ben asks: "Is it bad to use hyphens or colons as separators since those often get used in story titles or archive pages?"

Excellent question. Here's a particularly exaggerated example of colon misuse:

Maneater: Steve Lippo: MU halftime: a grand tradition

I made that site's CMS, so, naturally, I'm super-qualified to pick on it. The site inserts "Maneater:" at the start of every article's title. For columns, it also inserts the columnist's name, along with another colon. Thus, when there's a colon in the headline, too, the amount of colons gets just plain silly. It becomes difficult to scan and hard to tell where the real headline begins. In hindsight, a better organization for this particular headline would be:

MU halftime: a grand tradition [Maneater]

I opted to use brackets instead of parentheses because parentheses tend to imply a relationship, while brackets are a bit more distant. Let's say I write an article about my favorite Web site, google.com, and it appears on cnn.com with the headline "My favorite Web site." With parentheses, following my guideline above would yield:

My favorite Web site (cnn.com)

The parentheses and word placement might lead a casual browser to believe my favorite Web site is cnn.com, when, in actuality, the article is about Google and happens to be published on cnn.com. See the distinction? Brackets imply less of a relationship:

My favorite Web site [cnn.com]

A pipe ( | ) could also be used. I'd like to hear some opinions on which character(s) is/are best.

Non-story pages

All my comments here apply only to story pages. Other pages, like news sites' home pages, are a whole different story. I'll tackle that issue in the future.

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October 24, 2002, 10:11 PM ET

A follow-up on nytimes.com ad placement

JD Lasica has some fine points in response to my comments today regarding nytimes.com ad placement. In short, JD argues that the problem I point out isn't a particularly important problem and that's why technical solutions haven't yet been adopted:

Is there anyone out there short of a dimwit or conspiracy theorist who thinks the New York Times would risk its reputation by slanting a review just because it accepts some pocket-change advertising income from an MSN ad that occasionally pops up on a news page?

I know, and I acknowledge many others know, that New York Times coverage probably will not be influenced by advertising. The intention of my blog entry (which I should have made more clear) was not to chastize nytimes.com, but to point out the need for a technological means of avoiding this problem -- which, I maintain, is important. I see two ways this can be accomplished:

Venturing from the ethics world into the similarly important world of good taste, here's a more realistic situation in which this'd be useful -- a story about a plane crash juxtaposed with an advertisement for an airline. I've seen this before. Do you think it's acceptable to have a Delta Airlines ad right above a plane-crash article? It looks bad for the news publication, and it looks bad for Delta. That's precisely where this type of software would come in.

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October 24, 2002, 1:13 PM ET

Thursday's recommended reading

Web design group 37signals has released "Sites that Don't Click," a 10-page analysis of how easy it is to buy products on 10 retail Web sites. The report's findings are just as applicable to news sites; it's important to make it easy to access stories -- directly, not indirectly (as previously discussed on Holovaty.com).

The latest Small Initiatives newsletter says, among other things:

Maybe it's time for a "new" news site -- something that doesn't look anything like all the other sites (which all look the same to me, their awards notwithstanding).

Evolt offers tips to spam-proof your Web site. My prefered method of spam-proofing e-mail addresses is to avoid displaying e-mail addresses entirely, or, if necessary, spell out e-mail addresses (e.g., "web [at the domain] holovaty [a dot] com"). Simon Willison's method -- shielding addresses behind Web forms -- seems to be effective, too.

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October 24, 2002, 11:32 AM ET

Advertising placement at nytimes.com

Something's wrong when you start seeing overwhelming MSN ads on a nytimes.com article comparing the new versions of MSN and AOL:

Small screenshot of site, showing MSN ads
(Large screenshot: 101 KB)

The Times article (login name: cyberpunk21; password: cyberpunk21) is a reviewer's comparison of the two products. But, with MSN advertisements surrounding the content, the page indirectly suggests the article is biased toward MSN -- diminishing The New York Times' journalistic credibility.

Simply put, it encourages the perception of conflict of interest. And that's a big no-no.

In fairness, I'll point out that reloading the page brings up different ads that have little to do with MSN or AOL. But that doesn't excuse the fact that some users will see the MSN advertisements, make the connection and lower their opinion of the publication.

Some might argue it's good advertising strategy to place the MSN ad on an MSN-related article; after all, people interested in this article will likely be interested in the ad, leading to more click-throughs. Yes, that's true, but a bunch of extra click-throughs does not make this any less unethical. Ethics of journalism come first; advertising needs come second.

The lesson here? Newspaper content-management systems ought to include the ability to turn off certain ads for certain articles. In this case, an nytimes.com producer should have been able to turn off the MSN ad for this article.

UPDATE, 10:11 PM: I've posted a follow-up to this entry.

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October 22, 2002, 1:13 PM ET

Tuesday's recommended reading

Jay Small has begun pinging weblogs.com after blog updates; thus, I've added Small Initiatives to this site's blogroll. Look there for smart, well-written commentary on new media matters.

A new RSS validator has been introduced. Other validators have been around for a while, but this one is particularly user-friendly and comprehensive, covering all versions of the syndication format. As more news sites catch on to the fact that RSS is, basically, free advertising, they'll find it's not only important to provide a feed, but keep it free of code errors. This validator helps locate those errors.

A few weeks ago I wrote about accessibility court cases and their possible effects on news sites. Now, CNet reports on the outcome of one of those cases: "A federal judge ruled Friday that Southwest Airlines does not have to revamp its Web site to make it more accessible to the blind." In other words, the Americans with Disabilities Act does not apply to the Web. Mark Pilgrim's reaction and Douglas Bowman's reaction are worth reading.

On the other hand, here in Atlanta, a federal judge ruled that the Web site of the city's transit system has violated the ADA.

Anitra Pavka predicts this issue will head to the U.S. Supreme Court. I hope so.

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October 21, 2002, 12:31 PM ET

The Google user-interface perspective

In a goodexperience.com interview, Google product manager Marissa Mayer describes her philosophy on Google's usefulness:

I think Google should be like a Swiss Army knife: clean, simple, the tool you want to take everywhere. When you need a certain tool, you can pull these lovely doodads out of it and get what you want. So on Google, rather than showing you upfront that we can do all these things, we give you tips to encourage you to do things these ways. We get you to put your query in the search field, rather than have all these links up front. That's worked well for us. Like when you see a knife with all 681 functions opened up, you're terrified. That's how other sites are - you're scared to use them. Google has that same level of complexity, but we have a simple and functional interface on it, like the Swiss Army knife closed.

This absolutely nails how I think a news site should function. Don't scare me away with hundreds of headlines and links. Do make it easy for me to find the news I want, at a detail level of my choosing.

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October 21, 2002, 12:26 PM ET

While I was gone...

The Columbia Missourian's Web site, columbiamissourian.com, redesigned its home page in a completely CSS-based layout. Not a single layout table to be found. Bravo! More on this later; I'm told they're still fixing some kinks, as is to be expected.

Web design guru Jeffrey Zeldman also redesigned his site in all CSS. And Opera's site (home of the Opera Web browser) made the CSS leap last week -- as did Wired News, in case you haven't heard.

Wired News designer Douglas Bowman wrote about reaction to the site's redesign and how easy it is to make design tweaks now that the site is CSSified.

In "All the News That's Fit to PDF," Robin Sloan of Poynter.org examined those awkward newspaper "electronic editions" we've been seeing -- digitized versions of print-edition layouts. (See my previous thoughts and reader discussion on this topic.) Robin concludes that PDFs are a fine way of showcasing print designers' work, and an easy way for smaller newspapers to put at least something online. But they're no substitute for well-designed Web pages in their own right. (Disclaimer: The article quotes me.)

Federal Computer Week reported "only a handful [of government agencies] have spent the energy necessary to make sure their Web sites are accessible and useful. And so far, they haven't had a lot of help."

MSNBC.com made a few navigation changes, uh, sometime in the past few days. The announcement isn't dated.

Craig Saila, an outstanding journalism/technology blogger, agreed to ping weblogs.com regularly. Thanks to that, I've added his weblog, Living Can Kill You, to this site's blogroll (which uses data from weblogs.com and blo.gs to order sites by last-updated time).

Mozilla 1.2 beta was released. It has a new feature, link prefetching, which will automatically download and cache the "next" page, as defined by the Web page's creator. I have mixed opinions on this; more later.

Information architecture expert Louis Rosenfeld presented several "effective, low-cost techniques for making the case for investing in user experience design." My favorite: Show decision makers a videotape of confused and frustrated users. That's bound to get them thinking about user interfaces.

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October 20, 2002, 11:45 PM ET

Back from New York

Whew.

I'm back from New York City, where I attended the Online News Association conference (and spoke about database journalism on the Web).

A quick list of highlights: I got to have dinner with famous blogger Anil Dash, who was also nice enough to play NYC tour guide for a bit. Also had the privilege of chatting with Krishna Bharat, the man behind Google News. Plus, I got to meet lots of great folks in the online journalism industry. The conference panels presented some innovative ideas, too.

There's much to blog about -- not only my trip, but Web developments that've happened over the past few days. I'll start tomorrow.

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October 16, 2002, 9:26 PM ET

No updates for a few days

I'm off to New York City tomorrow morning for the annual Online News Association conference. I'm not sure whether I'll have Web access, so this site might not be updated for a few days. I'll be back Sunday night.

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October 16, 2002, 12:54 PM ET

Wednesday's recommended reading

Digital Web Magazine has two good articles: "Creating User-Focused Websites" and "Making a Timeless User Experience." The latter article, in which I detected a bit of disaffection toward the Web standards movement, suggests designing to accommodate older browsers is essential. I'll point out that well-designed, standards-based sites are accessible in all browsers -- even the old ones.

A new Webmonkey article, "The Secret Life of Markup," clarifies what "markup" really means and sheds light on the importance of separating presentation from content.

Mark Pilgrim deconstructs the myths of Web accessibility. I like this quote particularly:

The next time someone stands up in a design meeting and claims that you don't have any blind customers, ask them if they care about search engine placement. Then remind them that Google is a blind user who reads the entire Internet every month, and then reports what it sees to millions of its closest friends.

Have you seen the css-discuss Wiki yet? It's a growing resource of CSS tips put together by folks from the css-discuss mailing list. Because it's a Wiki, anybody can add, delete or change its content. This is true community-driven content. I've contributed a bit; the obsessive-compulsive completist in me really relishes in adding information and filling the gaps. (As an aside, I'd really like to see a newspaper start up a community Wiki...)

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October 14, 2002, 12:25 PM ET

Discussion about Wired News redesign

The folks on the online-news discussion list have been discussing Wired News' recent all-CSS redesign. I posted this comment today:

> But the Wired site is ugggggly. No sense
> of serendipity. And hard-to-read black-on-white
> text on the left.

I respectfully disagree.

You may think Wired News' design is ugly, but the beauty -- rather, *one* beauty -- of CSS-based design is: You can make sitewide design changes in a matter of minutes.

So if enough Wired readers complain about the color scheme, site designers can change one or two lines in a file, and, voila -- problem solved.

(It's not quite that easy on a table-based layout with hard-coded font tags, as I'm sure you know. In fact, in most cases, it's a huge headache.)

The folks at Wired News haven't just redesigned. They've built a framework.

> Likely designed by programmers who were
> responding to a study -- rather than by the
> business-side folks who want to keep folks
> visiting the site on a regular basis.

How's this for good business practice:

  • Saving time and money on development
  • Saving time and money on maintenance
  • Saving time and money on production
  • Saving money on bandwidth

I'd say those are good things. Adopting CSS is not only a good technological decision; it's a smart business move.

Regarding "keep[ing] folks visiting the site on a regular basis":

  • CSS cuts down drastically on page load time.
  • CSS lets designers do more than tables will allow (with few exceptions).
  • CSS enables user-level site customization. Examples: alltheweb.com/alchemist, waferbaby.com/mybaby.

And, to address the issue of legacy browser support, two points:

  • Designers need to accept their designs won't look the same in every browser. This is the Web, not paper.
  • When viewed in legacy browsers, smartly coded CSS-based designs that "degrade nicely" are acceptable. Frankly, on many news sites, I'd rather view a plain, text-only version than attempt to navigate the cluttered "real" version.

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October 11, 2002, 1:21 PM ET

Why don't big-company sites use valid code?

NUblog asks: "Why is the only reliable source for valid Web pages the single person typing away at home?" That is, why do Web companies -- with dozens of supposedly talented developers and designers -- ignore Web standards, while single-person-run sites (such as this one) are completely capable of creating valid code?

"Frankly, this is getting embarrassing," the entry says. "It's the kids showing up the adults." I might add that Wired News is that cool uncle all the kids like.

A few answers and theories are in my old blog entry, "Why news sites don't use XHTML and CSS".

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October 11, 2002, 1:14 PM ET

Who says we're making progress?

I got a huge kick out of Eric Ulken's E-Media Tidbits comment regarding the trend of newspapers posting PDFs of its print-edition layouts online:

I don't understand. We've made so much progress in new media. Why are we suddenly so interested in mimicking old media? The Web as we know it is a splendid interface -- hardly perfect, but it's getting better all the time. I have yet to hear any compelling reasons for replicating newspaper pages online. If a newspaper wants to distribute its pages in PDF format so people can print them, great. But why go to all this trouble to display newspaper pages (mid-sentence jumps and all) in a Web browser? If people weren't throwing so much money at this idea, I'd swear it was a joke.

I agree, Eric. The whole idea is bogus -- clearly invented in the twisted minds of newspaper and advertising executives who have no concept of the medium. They don't have a clue.

By the way: For a good laugh, check out gazette.com, which was kindly pointed out to me by Curt W. Its idea of innovation is slopping images of the print newspaper online. Funny thing is, they're serious about it; their user guide says, "Welcome to the Gazette, the future of online newspapers."

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October 11, 2002, 1:07 PM ET

Wired News redesigns in all CSS

Wired News has redesigned. In a tremendous win for Web standards and modern Web technologies such as XHTML, the site now uses an all-CSS layout. The site's announcement says it "may be the first major, heavily trafficked, constantly updated site to adopt [Web standards]." CSS guru Eric Meyer is quoted:

This new design is more accessible, faster to download, more flexible and much easier on the Web server itself. Anyone interested in the future of the Web need look no further than this.

Not to mention the site's reliance on style sheets opens the door to many innovations -- such as dynamic text resizing, which the site has already implemented.

I can't articulate how important this redesign is. I suspect and hope it's a major step that will be emulated by many. Proponents of Web standards and CSS are one step closer to reaching critical mass.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: It's always refreshing to witness a news site that has a clue, technologically.

UPDATE, 3:50 p.m.: Meyer interviews a Wired News site developer who gives more technical details on the redesign.

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October 10, 2002, 12:40 PM ET

Thursday's recommended reading

Hypergene MediaBlog is a new blog "All about Participatory Journalism -- how audiences are changing the future of news and information." Great stuff, including something that looks familiar: Site reviews. I've added the site to my blogroll on Holovaty.com's home page, so you should be able to tell when the site is updated -- as long as they take the time to ping weblogs.com, which, I've observed, they only do on occasion. UPDATE, 1:15 p.m.: Chris from Hypergene e-mailed me to say the site will ping regularly.

The latest Hypergene MediaBlog entry reviews Google News and, among other things, suggests it should provide custom RSS feeds of search results. Google News in RSS does just that -- although, as Mark Pilgrim points out, the hacked service might not last long, considering Google's Terms of Service.

A recent E-Media Tidbits item, "Will New Quark Move Print Designers to the Web?", sparked some good discussion on WYSIWYG Web page editors and how useful -- or, in my opinion, terrible -- they are.

Dan Gillmor complains about an inept, unusable Web site.

The latest Small Initiatives newsletter lists "Things that make a good content search suite." I'm working on adding many of those features to my custom-built search engine, which (hopefully) will be released to the public.

A week from today I'll be in New York City for the Online News Association conference. I'll be on the Web databases panel, speaking about the Nursing Home Guide I put together a few months ago. If you plan on going, or if you live in New York and would like to say hello, drop me a line. I'm also looking for tips on what to do; this will be my first trip to NYC.

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October 9, 2002, 11:44 AM ET

Link directly to articles. Please.

There's been some talk on the online-news discussion list about the tendency of some news sites to link home-page headlines to intermediary index pages instead of linking directly to the articles. (For example, a headline "Mozilla getting more popular" might link to the general technology page, which contains a link to the story itself.)

A few culprits were singled out:

This practice is a usability nightmare. It forces users to search twice for the story they want to read: Once on the home page itself, and again on the intermediary page.

It's like asking for directions at a gas station and being told, "Drive a mile north, and ask again at the gas station up there." In the words of one online-news list member: "Every time I follow one of these links, I feel cheated."

This isn't only frustrating; it cheapens a site and makes it less credible. From my experience, people are cynical enough to believe this technique is done solely to increase page views. Is this an attitude you'd want your site's users to take?

A Brazilian member of the online-news list reported it's a common practice in Brazil:

The usual method is: A teaser in the very home page, a click takes you to a section/sub-site home page, and finally to the final destination. ... One may say that's for the context and to allow the user to see more of what he's interested, but I believe it's just for the audience numbers.

Aha. The audience numbers. Never mind the fact that if you frustrate users enough, they'll stop visiting your site entirely -- which, I might point out, does not bode well for audience numbers.

I advise news sites -- and any other information-based sites -- to stop this practice entirely.

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October 8, 2002, 11:51 PM ET

Site review: suntimes.com's 'online partners'

Suntimes.com, Web site of the Chicago Sun-Times, has links to "Visit our online partners:" at the bottom of almost every page sitewide. Here are the links, worded as they appear on the site:

What do these sites have in common? They're all properties of Hollinger International, a large media chain that owns the Sun-Times. It seems as if some executive at Hollinger decided to require suntimes.com to link to other papers in the chain, without considering whether those links would be of any value.

And indeed, many of these links are utterly useless. The Jerusalem Post? The UK's Daily Telegraph? There's nothing here to explain why a reader of the Chicago Sun-Times would ever want to click those.

I can see how the link to Suburban Chicago Newspapers is useful -- not only because that site's content is relevant to Sun-Times readers, but also because it includes the "Suburban Chicago" in the link text; that tells me what I should expect to see upon clicking the link.

The link to "Post-Tribune," on the other hand, means little to me. If it weren't grouped with the Jerusalem Post, maybe I'd guess (correctly) that it's another Chicago-area newspaper. But putting it next to the Post throws it all out of whack; it makes me skeptical of all those links.

I'd suggest they remove these links, because they're unnecessary, confusing and seemingly random. But if they insist on keeping them, here are two suggestions:

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October 7, 2002, 11:58 AM ET

Monday's recommended reading

"Common Principles: A Usable Interface Design Primer" offers good tips on "maximizing interface efficiency." "14 Principles of Polite Apps" applies to Web sites, as well. (Links from InfoDesign)

Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman rips into Knight Ridder sites' URL schemes, which, when played with, are completely nonsensical. And I thought www.ohio.com/mld/kentucky/ would give me Ohio news.

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October 7, 2002, 11:56 AM ET

Accessibility court cases worth thinking about

Does the Americans with Disabilities Act apply to the Internet? Are Web sites (at least, American ones) required by law to be accessible to alternate browsers such as screen readers? Two lawsuits could decide this once and for all, reports a law.com article.

The court cases involve the Web sites of two airline companies, which offer exclusive Web ticket price discounts and happen to be inaccessible to screen readers. Obviously, because there's no other way to get these discounts, users who can't access the site can't get the discounts.

It'll be interesting to see how this turns out. According to the law.com article, many believe this could end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. Mark Pilgrim says this could be an "accessibility watershed." Slashdot folk are already asking whether they should redesign their sites to make them more accessible.

But what about news sites? Does this matter to them?

Duh.

Most news sites don't offer exclusive ticket prices -- but many offer exclusive news. They're producing more and more online-only content, from breaking news stories to exclusive columns. If alternate browsers can't access this online-only content -- and that content is of some value -- you can bet that's a lawsuit waiting to happen.

And forget about the lawsuit threat for a second, and think about the larger role journalists play. Philosophically, it's critical that there be universal access to journalism, because it's one of the most important foundations of democracy. Plus, it's insanely hypocritical that news organizations, which historically have trumpeted freedom of information, tend to produce Web sites grossly inaccessible to users of alternate browsers. (For more on this, see my interview with a blind Internet user.)

Don't wait until the law makes you do it. Make your site accessible now. The longer you wait, the more you'll have to clean up later.

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October 3, 2002, 7:02 PM ET

Thursday's recommended reading

ColorMatch 5K is an incredibly useful tool. Select a color, and it'll return complimentary colors. Problem is, it doesn't work in Mozilla. But it's fine in IE. (Link from xBlog)

Wired News: Reality Check for Web Design. "Despite progress, websites today are still three times harder for users with disabilities to use than for other users." And while we're on the subject, Microsoft.com's redesign is quite inaccessible and has lousy code, to boot.

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October 2, 2002, 1:20 PM ET

Wednesday's recommended reading

Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman is back from a blogging hiatus to bring us some thoughts on timestamps on news sites, including this great idea:

A clearer system would be to use both modification and creation dates -- both an "updated" time and a "posted" time, which would be closer to when the event occurred.

Principles of good GUI Design is geared toward desktop applications, but its lessons are quite applicable to the Web. (Link from InfoDesign)

Additional Lessons for Web Design from Mall and Retail Design concludes the three-part series I wrote about a few weeks back. The series compares Web design to the design of stores in the mall.

There were some great user comments in my entry yesterday about "previous" and "next" links on news sites.

New York Times as a Weblog was put together by everybody's favorite overly intelligent teenager, Aaron Swartz. It's generated from automated feeds. Reminds me of Nic Wolff's Filters.

Building accessible tables, a detailed yet straightforward evolt.org tutorial, is outstanding. I learned a bunch of tips I can't wait to use.

The latest SearchDay newsletter sheds some more light on the technical aspects of Google News. I got a kick out of this sentence (emphasis added):

The vast diversity and typically cluttered design of most online news formats is more difficult to crawl and index than many other types of web sites.

If news sites used standards-compliant code and logical HTML structure, this wouldn't be an issue.

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October 1, 2002, 1:52 PM ET

A clear path to better navigation

Many people -- even seasoned Web designers -- don't know about <link rel="prev"... /> and <link rel="next"... />, which are two lines of HTML code you can put on any Web page in order to give your users easy navigational cues to the "previous" and "next" pages on your site.

With those two pieces of code in a page, modern browsers (such as Mozilla, or Netscape 6 and up, but not Internet Explorer) will automatically provide a way for users to navigate to the previous or next page. In Mozilla and new versions of Netscape, for example, there's something called the Site Navigation Bar, which is a GUI for site navigation. (Turn on the feature by going to the "View" menu, then "Show/Hide," then "Site Navigation Bar," then "Show Always". When you do that, you'll get a small horizontal bar with buttons that include "Previous" and "Next.")

Doing this offers an obvious benefit: a supplemental, consistent way of navigating your site. Plus, it makes your site more accessible. Those two simple lines of code can be a great benefit to users of alternate browsers. See Dive Into Accessibility for more.

So why do I bring this up? Two reasons.

One, I've added this functionality to Holovaty.com.

(I've also added textual links to "previous" and "next," under "THIS PAGE," on all the aforementioned archive pages.)

Two, I think every news site should be doing this.

One of the biggest problems with online newspapers is the experience of reading them. There's no clear path through the news -- an advantage print newspapers have had since the get-go.

In a print newspaper, you start at the front page and read until you've reached the end. If you don't feel like reading a story, you skip it and go to the next one. When you reach the end, it's over. Complete. There's a sense of accomplishment and a sense of closure. You can move on with your life.

Not so online. There's so much garbage on news sites that, oftentimes, reading one actually leaves you more frustrated and overwhelmed than enlightened. Each click to a new page brings more headlines. You start forgetting what you've read, what you haven't read, what you don't want to read -- and what you wanted to read but lost track of five clicks ago.

That's why I'm convinced "previous" and "next" links are such a good idea.

More people would read more online news stories if they were given something as simple as a linear navigation. Many sites try to overwhelm users with "Complete coverage!" "Unedited transcripts!" "50 related links!" I'm not advocating the abolition of these features; they're a great help to someone who's interested in a topic. But for the people who just want to catch up on the day's news, there's no clear path. And, importantly, there's no sense of closure.

A few news sites already provide this feature. Some examples:

It's great to see "previous story" and "next story" links in action, but what these examples lack is consistency. Sometimes the "previous" and "next" links appear at the top of the page; sometimes they're at the bottom. Sometimes they're colored arrow icons; sometimes they're text links. Web users have very little incentive to relearn a convention for every site they visit.

That's where <link rel="prev"... /> and <link rel="next"... /> come in. They're consistent. Those links will always be in the same place -- in your Site Navigation Bar (if you're using Mozilla and NS6+).

Put those links in, tell the public they're there and explain how to use them -- and I'm sure your site will see results.

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Thanks for reading.

A Django site.