Hollywood heart-throb Mel Gibson (whose ear is pictured above) has seven children, aged from four to 22, with his wife Robyn.
Worthy of noting is the coincidence that Blue Velvet began just an hour after I wrote this. Maybe the editors were subconciously aware of this fact when planning today’s coverage?
But this particular grumble isn’t about that particular aspect. It’s about how the present system should be improved while keeping things backwards compatible. It’s about how links are created and presented.
At the moment there’s an unsatisfactory correspondence between the words in the text and the words used to describe the link. Allow me to demonstrate. My entry Documentary style * starts like this: Saw two documentaries back to back just now on Channel 4. The one was about developing the JSF and the other concerned the Moscow theatre hostage tragedy
. Within I’ve also provided links to the programmes I’ve mentioned.
However, due to the limitations of HTML markup, I’ve had to use the phrases ”developing the JSF” and ”Moscow theatre hostage tragedy” as links. Strictly speaking it is wrong, because I’m not providing links to, say, news stories about these incidents, but am rather referring to two specific television broadcasts. A better way to do this would’ve been to somehow include the words ”Channel 4 documentary” into the link (even though it’s not true, technically speaking; the programmes were most likely only funded by C4).
So how to overcome this technical hurdle? One way is to adapt to whatever limitations one has been presented with and use, for example, subordinate clauses. After all the old rule of thumb is ”if you can’t figure it out, don’t do it”. This approach seems counter-intuitive. The TITLE attribute of HTML 4.0 Strict (which is what I’m talking about, you can go and shove your XHTML up where it belongs) goes a long way to achieve this goal. It’s not the perfect answer, however.
Another example: the footnote. The linked words are ”improve my microcontent”, when what is intended is ”how to improve microcontent (in any writing)”. One possible solution would be to only link the word ”microcontent” and let TITLE do the explaining. In the end both alternatives are misleading: the first option is downright false and the second one seriously lacking. The problem is multiplied because search engines do not take TITLE into account at all, at least not yet.
My headlines are, generally speaking, horrible – I really should improve my microcontent.
One would be hard-pressed to imagine a greater contrast between the two. The first one was basically a big publicity spot for the US and UK armed forces, full of stock footage, a tantalizingly stupid soundtrack and nothing but praise for the developers of the new multi-role fighters. And it’s going to be a two-parter. Duh.
The second one was far more serious in tone, and was actually very craftily made. The usage of music was perhaps a bit over the top too, as the material itself provided plenty of drama (over 150 people died there). However, the programme did have one major fault: it was completely ahistorical.
I understand the maker’s decision to concentrate on only the minutiae, because the material – video shot by the terrorists, the outside TV cameras and later interviews with survivors – was outstanding. But there was not one mention of why 41 Chechens had decided they were ready to kill hundreds of people, including themselves.
The need for contextualization came clear by the reaction of my flatmate Owen. He hadn’t followed the story when it unfolded and had even less idea about the Chechen-Russian war. In a peculiar way this reminded me of Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down which too presented a tragic struggle without any context.
Well, that and it was stupendously one-sided. And not truthful. But you get the gist of what I’m saying, right?
But what was notable about the day was that I finally sampled the food at this Indian restaurant the name of which I can’t remember right now (I’ll ask someone else as soon as they wake up. UPDATE: Okay, the name is Kismet). Anyhow, it’s the one up City Street, number 100 and something. And here’s what’s so great about it: an eat all you can buffet for £2.5. Yes, only £2.5. I doubt there’s a better offer quality- or quantity-wise available around here.
So in I go, tired from several hours of walking. I ask the friendly waiter (for contrast see the slackers at WHSmith; last time one of them was staring into emptiness, while a second tried to chat up a third one) for a portion, was shown to my table and told that it’s self service. Okay, so I went to load up on the goodies and ohmygod, the food was perfect. Some chicken (with sauce), some potatoes (with sauce) and rice. I intentionally skipped the beans, though even they might’ve been edible in this gorgeous place. Having finished, I head back to the avian smorgasbord – twice.
By the time I got home about an hour later, I was bloated and had to spend the rest of the night burping. But what glorious, £2.5 Indian burps they were.
And yes, I’m watching Blue Velvet at the moment. Don’t worry, I’m taping it as well, so I won’t miss anything because of short typing pauses.
I like to split them down according to sections and sort them into different piles: sport, business, travel first (cos I’m not really interested in them), news pages second, review and magazines last. I just finished with the last Sunday paper and am now slowly moving onto the magazines of which there are approximately half a dozen.
The thing is that you just can’t do this stuff with WWW versions. They’re handy for references because of hyperlinking, most of them are still free (the Times requires a registration), some of them have even more stuff online than in print, they’re searchable etc. But it’s damn near impossible to go through them, from alpha to omega, in an orderly fashion. Plus that usually the web versions aren’t very readable – they still use tables or layers to emulate fixed-size columns, printer-friendly pages don’t have even rudimentary navigation (not to mention pictures) and so on ad nauseam. This is the main reason I haven’t gotten into reading the New York Times or Washington Post regularly. I’ve tried, especially with NYT’s Sunday edition, but it just isn’t working.
So what could be done to solve the problem? Well, a downloadable PDF version might work. After all, most publishing systems are perfectly capable of doing such things, and many even use them as an interface between the DTP system and the press. But then again, PDFs really aren’t suitable for online reading, especially when they’re large – and we’re talking about hundreds of pages of material here.
One might do what Keskisuomalainen is trying and produce an image/text hybrid for online reading. It fulfills some of my conditions: one can browse through it in a linear matter and it’s perfectly readable because the stories are presented in a text-only format. However, you cannot download it, which means that you have to be online, and that can still be an issue unless you’ve got a nice laptop and a nice WLAN set up. And where’s search?
Even if the virtual approach used by KSML was perfected, there’d still be other things that need attending to. For example, the print edition’s page numbers should definitely be cross-referenced with online pages. Think of it as an universal URL (actually I’m quite sure that there are techies out there who’ve deviced a way to assign unique identifiers to newspaper pages… or am I thinking of ISSN?).
For the sake of argument lets assume that all the newspapers finally find a solution that’s both usable and viable. The big question is: how did they achieve the latter? Online publishing has been a bogey man for the traditional media for nearly a decade. No one knows how to make people pay for content unless for niche markets (say, porn and stock market). A complaint heard often enough in all the newspapers around the world is ”if I could choose, I’d only get the news/sports/arts/comics pages”. Well, it could be achieved online. In fact I think it would be reasonable. Adverts could be targeted better, people would have less complaints, (proportionally) more money could be charged for reading just a few pieces of the paper and so on. Of course this all would require people to regard online versions not as a burden but a possibility. And unfortunately the event horizon for this is still quite some time away.
It’s a shame entries cannot be filed into multiple categories in blosxom. Notes like this clearly belong under both internet and media.
I’d really appreciate this one moment of co-operation cos I really want to make this blog a friendlier place and write about stuff people want to hear. I promise I won’t use the data to blackmail anyone into anything (because, as Bender said in Futurama, I prefer coercion
). And yes, this does include both my IRC regulars and so-called real life friends (note that the stress falls on the first two words, not the last one) cos I really really need some gratification now.
Thank you all in advance.
If there is something genuine then I enjoy working with it, but many things are not genuine – in fact they’re desperate, plainly inadequate and requiring a facelift.The Independent on Sunday Review 11.5.2003, p. 16 (emphasis mine)