I loved the detail and eloquence of a three-part comment on an sfgate movie review. I thought Id reproduce it here before it got removed. Are the past-appearance references for the actors chosen at random? Is there a human being alive who, when someone says, Brian Dennehy, responds with, Right! He was so good in Death of a Salesman!? This *is* 2013 -- barely -- and clearly the concept of hyperlinks is not entirely baffling to the folks at Hearst, given the generous ladling of such over this article. ---generous, but inconsistent, that is. Maj. Gen. Donald E. Kutyna merits a shout-out, but Sally Ride doesnt? As neither do the actors portraying Kutyna and Ride. Similarly, The Right Stuff gets hopped-up, unlike any of its supposed thematic brethren. Thinking hyperlinks might be added by an automated Hearst staffer, I clicked on one to see if I could suss out any hidden truths -- but, alas, all it demonstrated was a sorely un-hidden truth: Sfgate has *cr@p* programming. Whatever code underlies the hyperlink system is totally whack: Click on Brian Dennehy, and half the responses on the first page are duplicates, referencing a blog entry on Ewan MacGregor in The Pillow Book, which presumably mentions Dennehy somewhere. I cant tell for sure, though, since the responses all point to a no-longer existing blog entry (or incorrectly point not quite at the URL for an actual entry). Seven of ten entries on the second page, as well, are duplicates -- albeit potentially more-relevant dupes this time, as not only do they lead to an actual blog post, but the post is actually about *Brian Dennehy*! True, it *is* a two-year-old entry from a [presumably Hearst-owned] Connecticut newspaper, concerning Dennehys appearance in a local (to Connecticut) performance of Samuel Becketts Krapps Last Tape -- but it *is* a valid hit. True, it neednt have appeared 11 times in a row. Far more importantly, though, whoever hacked together the indexing routine didnt bother to filter and replace invalid characters -- for instance, the pretty-print versions of single and double quotes. Actually, this is a problem caused by stupid programming at Hearsts Connecticut News site being exacerbated by hometown stupid programming. In brief, The ctnews site should trap invalid (for SGML/HTML) ASCII codes 128 through 159 and replace them with the equivalent UTF-8 entities. Their comments code (likely purchased or purloined from elsewhere) does this: When a reader enters something like this, it changes the opening and closing quotes to UTF-8-encoded inverted commas, oriented correctly. It also prettifies any apostrophes in the comments text (like the one back there) -- it even would have fixed my typed double-hyphen dash by changing it to a typographically correct em-dash. Yeah, its a minor thing -- but it really *can* improve a sites overall mouthfeel. Its also not exactly cutting-edge web programming; its pretty much de rigueur for any serious web publisher these days. (I just hit four sites at random: The Atlantic, Washington Post, Wired, and Rolling Stone. The only one that doesnt tweak web typography is [oddly enough, given their age-old penchant for font fetishism] Rolling Stone....) Hell, I built it into the content management system I wrote for the online edition of the late, lamented Spectator newsweekly, geez, 14 or 15 years ago. Bottom line is, yes, the Connecticut programmers are idiots for allowing invalid characters (actually, theyre idiots in other ways, as well: try accessing ctnews or ctnews for an example) -- but the folks here shouldnt have let them slip past, either. Finally, why bother fixing this? Even if it should one day work, its still not anything one would ever need or desire. When a reader clicks on a name, he or she expects to be taken to a handy, information-rich site of some degree of canonicity -- say, IMDB or Wikipedia -- not dumped unsuspecting into a meaningless spew of random Hearst-besmirched blog musings and calendar entries. Is the desire to monetize every twitch of that readers finger so great, the only thing that matters is maximum delivery of Hearst-affiliated content? Whatever happened to the medias most fundamental raisons detre: To inform and to entertain? Addendum: I realize the comments section is third-party code -- either poorly written or poorly integrated.[1] Still, if one is going to limit comments to some arbitrary length, isnt it only fair to let folks know there *is* a max length? Even better, perhaps the [horribly slow and glitchy] edit window could include a real-time tally of characters used and remaining? Hell, simply locking input after 1800 characters would be an improvemenmt. __________ Fn 1. As an example, try commenting on a popular slideshow article: Most likely your comment-in-progress will disappear before you have a chance to save. It seems the system bizarrely refreshes to display whichever sub-page has the most recent comment -- flushing your edit window in the process. Even worse, youre probably now on a different sub-page than you were; if you *do* manage to post your comment, it probably makes reference to a slide or earlier comment from another sub-page. This guarantees youll have message threads consisting of seemingly random, context-free comments sprinkled across multiple sub-pages with no way to reassemble the sequence... sfgate/tv/article/The-Challenger-Disaster-review-A-true-thriller-4981585.php
Posted on: Sat, 16 Nov 2013 16:15:48 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015