BHIT: Web Idiots



I

Ian G Batten

Guest
So, linking from Guy's pages, I decided to go and have
a chortle.

First attempt: ``You don't appear to have the Shockwave plug-
in.'' OK, I've only got the Shockwave 5.0 plugin installed,
because Shockwave is the work of the devil, so I followed
the links and installed the latest bits. Shutdown the
browser [*], restart, and lo, Help->About Plugins shows I'm
now running Shockwave 6.0 r81, which is the latest and
greatest. Visit BHIT again. It _still_ says I'm not running
Shockwave, and offers me precisely the release I'm running.

Clearly, BHIT care more about pushing Shockwave than pushing
their ideas, so sadly I'll be unable to read their pearls of
wisdom. It's sad, isn't it?

Of course, were I a bad person, I'd suggest that as a
government funded body their website should comply with the
Disability Discrimination Act, and it's 99.9% certain that a
site which demands Flash in order to see its front page
isn't compliant. But making that complaint would be
childish, wouldn't it?

ian

[*] Mozilla 1.6 on Solaris 10 build 55. I could put on
Mozilla 1.7, or indeed Solaris 10 build 58. I doubt
it'll help.
 
Ian G Batten wrote:

> Of course, were I a bad person, I'd suggest that as a
> government funded body their website should comply with
> the Disability Discrimination Act, and it's 99.9% certain
> that a site which demands Flash in order to see its front
> page isn't compliant. But making that complaint would be
> childish, wouldn't it?

BHIT would probably claim that they wouldn't have been
disabled if they'd worn a helmet ;-)
 
On Mon, 28 Jun 2004 16:31:00 +0000 (UTC), Ian G Batten
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
>So, linking from Guy's pages, I decided to go and have
>a chortle.
>
>First attempt: ``You don't appear to have the Shockwave plug-
>in.'' OK, I've only got the Shockwave 5.0 plugin installed,
>because Shockwave is the work of the devil, so I followed
>the links and installed the latest bits. Shutdown the
>browser [*], restart, and lo, Help->About Plugins shows I'm
>now running Shockwave 6.0 r81, which is the latest and
>greatest. Visit BHIT again. It _still_ says I'm not running
>Shockwave, and offers me precisely the release I'm running.

Same here, Mozilla on Linux. But it is correct, we don't
have Shockwave, we have Shockwave Flash plugins. Shockwave
is only available for Windows and Mac. Great innit?

>Clearly, BHIT care more about pushing Shockwave than
>pushing their ideas, so sadly I'll be unable to read their
>pearls of wisdom. It's sad, isn't it?

Very. I was looking for a laugh, instead I got annoying
website stupidity before it even starts.

>Of course, were I a bad person, I'd suggest that as a
>government funded body their website should comply with the
>Disability Discrimination Act, and it's 99.9% certain that
>a site which demands Flash in order to see its front page
>isn't compliant. But making that complaint would be
>childish, wouldn't it?

Not in the slightest. Never mind government funding, anyone
who makes a site/frontpage like this needs a healthy dose of
**** kicking.

Frink

--
Doctor J. Frink : 'Rampant Ribald Ringtail' See his mind
here : http://www.cmp.liv.ac.uk/frink/ Annoy his mind here :
pjf at cmp dot liv dot ack dot ook "No sir, I didn't like
it!" - Mr Horse
 
in message <[email protected]>, Ian G Batten
('[email protected]') wrote:

>
> So, linking from Guy's pages, I decided to go and have a
> chortle.
>
> First attempt: ``You don't appear to have the Shockwave
> plug-in.'' OK, I've only got the Shockwave 5.0 plugin
> installed, because Shockwave is the work of the devil, so
> I followed the links and installed the latest bits.
> Shutdown the browser [*], restart, and lo, Help->About
> Plugins shows I'm now running Shockwave 6.0 r81, which is
> the latest and greatest. Visit BHIT again. It _still_ says
> I'm not running Shockwave, and offers me precisely the
> release I'm running.

Don't start.

The level of competence of the web 'design' industry is
enough to make any sensible person weep. Not one commercial
website in twenty conforms either to the published standards
or with the law on disability access, and in general it
seems the more money is spent the worse the outcome.

The is not something which is unique to dubious political
lobbying campaigns.

--
[email protected] (Simon Brooke)
http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

;; single speed mountain bikes: for people who cycle
on flat mountains.
 
[email protected] (Doctor J. Frink) writes:

>On Mon, 28 Jun 2004 16:31:00 +0000 (UTC), Ian G Batten
><[email protected]> wrote:

>>So, linking from Guy's pages, I decided to go and have a
>>chortle.
>>
>>First attempt: ``You don't appear to have the Shockwave
>>plug-in.'' OK, I've only got the Shockwave 5.0 plugin
>>installed, because Shockwave is the work of the devil, so
>>I followed the links and installed the latest bits.
>>Shutdown the browser [*], restart, and lo, Help->About
>>Plugins shows I'm now running Shockwave 6.0 r81, which is
>>the latest and greatest. Visit BHIT again. It _still_ says
>>I'm not running Shockwave, and offers me precisely the
>>release I'm running.

>Same here, Mozilla on Linux. But it is correct, we don't
>have Shockwave, we have Shockwave Flash plugins. Shockwave
>is only available for Windows and Mac. Great innit?

>>Clearly, BHIT care more about pushing Shockwave than
>>pushing their ideas, so sadly I'll be unable to read their
>>pearls of wisdom. It's sad, isn't it?

>Very. I was looking for a laugh, instead I got annoying
>website stupidity before it even starts.

>>Of course, were I a bad person, I'd suggest that as a
>>government funded body their website should comply with
>>the Disability Discrimination Act, and it's 99.9% certain
>>that a site which demands Flash in order to see its front
>>page isn't compliant. But making that complaint would be
>>childish, wouldn't it?

>Not in the slightest. Never mind government funding, anyone
>who makes a site/frontpage like this needs a healthy dose
>of **** kicking.

I wasn't looking forward to the day when I would have enough
free time to fulfil my public obligation to have a look at
what my tax payer's money has bought me on the BeHIT web
pages. I'm very pleased to discover that they're so stupid
they've made their pages unreadable by
me. In all likelihood, like most of the folk who do that
kind of thing, they'll even be too stupid to ever
understand how stupid it is to make a web site like
that, so I'll never be able to read it.

How nice to start the day by crossing off a nasty chore I no
longer have to do!
--
Chris Malcolm [email protected] +44 (0)131 651 3445 DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]
 
On 2004-06-28, Simon Brooke <[email protected]> wrote:
> Don't start.
>
> The level of competence of the web 'design' industry is
> enough to make any sensible person weep. Not one
> commercial website in twenty conforms either to the
> published standards or with the law on disability access,
> and in general it seems the more money is spent the worse
> the outcome.

Oops, I'm starting.

This is not helped by the belief that "With Microsoft anyone
can do it without any training, cause its so user friendly.
Even the secretary can administer a web site, as surely if
you know Word you can do anything - lower TCO, user friendly
operating system, perhaps we can use Nissan Micras to carry
our 40 tonne loads up the M1 by the same logic, after all
they scale outwards just like NT and you don't need
expensive HGV qualified drivers, wibble wibble...".

Too many developers are just used to point and drool in VB
without any understanding of whats going on. You can't just
let these people onto active web sites - as many of them
have never heard of things like Cross Site Scripting and SQL
Injection. "My site goes wrong when someone enters a single
quote into a text field - I wonder why". We're talking the
kind of people who'd email back your credit card details in
plain text as a receipt, and the people that employ them
don't know that there's anything wrong with this.

Fortunately things seem to be getting better. There's so
much security news in the news that I think people are
starting to take notice, and Microsoft's newer development
environments make it easier to avoid cross site scripting
and SQL Injection by providing the tools to avoid them and
making them more the natural choice to use, so the Point and
Drool crowd are steadily being dragged into the century of
the fruitbat.

I wonder if MS's poor site security and reliability
statistics are more to do with the attitude that anyone,
even without training or knowledge, can run a web site using
their tools than due to underlying faults in the tools
themselves. People using Linux based tools tend to know what
they're doing, for now, and big shops using J2EE tend to
have training plans and the infrastructure in place to make
sure someone there knows whats going on.

- Richard

--
_/_/_/ _/_/_/ _/_/_/ Richard dot Corfield at ntlworld dot
com _/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/ _/ _/ Time is a one way street, _/
_/ _/_/ _/_/_/ Except in the Twilight Zone.
 
> How nice to start the day by crossing off a nasty chore I
> no longer have to do!

Sorry for this, but here's a link to the main page that
should bypass the sillyness[1]

<url:http://www.bhit.org/index-home.html>

Mark.

[1] You're missing out on an animation of a bike riding
across the screen, and the following:

"You may be aware that a Private Member’s Bill is currently
passing through Parliament. The enactment of the Bill will
make the wearing of helmets mandatory for all children
riding bicycles. We entirely endorse and support this Bill
as it helps ensure the safety and well being of children.

It has come to our attention that we are being quoted out of
context on a number of websites attempting to demonstrate
their opposition to helmet wearing.

The following links will direct you to websites, which
detail the efficacy of helmets from independent
organisations. All the research is peer vetted and none
based on opinion from an individual or group."

[then links to sites including BHSI]
 
On 29/6/04 12:35 am, in article
[email protected], "Simon Brooke"
<[email protected]> wrote:

>
> Don't start.
>
> The level of competence of the web 'design' industry is
> enough to make any sensible person weep. Not one
> commercial website in twenty conforms either to the
> published standards or with the law on disability access,
> and in general it seems the more money is spent the worse
> the outcome.
>
> The is not something which is unique to dubious political
> lobbying campaigns.

We are currently getting bids from several design companies
to redo the institute website. My impression is that the
good people are actually very good. But there are a lot of
cowboys out there.

Lots of fun with interrogating them on DDA, graceful
degradation, standards compliance etc.

..d
 
Ian G Batten <[email protected]> wrote in message news:<[email protected]>...
> So, linking from Guy's pages, I decided to go and have a
> chortle.

I was inspired by your example and so I guessed the address
to go and have a look. What *could* a certain Urban Cyclist-
UK correspondent *possibly* want with the domain name
bhit.org.uk? Most strange?

www.bhit.org.uk/index2.html gives you pretty much the same
browser experience in Moz as IE/Flash.

I notice that they are still displaying the Nationwide logo.
I thought they had pulled their suppport.

fwiw these guys designed it (and are proud enough of their
work to want a logo on the site) http://www.imagebox.co.uk/

If you ever want a quote from the site to use as a tagline
for a link then this rather sums up their pov

http://www.bhit.org/mad.html "MAD riders never cycle without
their helmets"

best wishes james
 
On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 09:59:34 +0100, David Martin
<[email protected]> wrote in message
<BD06EE06.19468%[email protected]>:

>We are currently getting bids from several design companies
>to redo the institute website. My impression is that the
>good people are actually very good. But there are a lot of
>cowboys out there. Lots of fun with interrogating them on
>DDA, graceful degradation, standards compliance etc.

We got the Third Degree on that from B&Q when we did their
recruitment site. But we had expected it, so we knew more
about it than they did and ended up showing them things they
didn't know :)

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after
posting. http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at
Washington University
 
On 29 Jun 2004 08:39:57 GMT, Mark Thompson
<[email protected]> wrote in message
<[email protected]>:

>[then links to sites including BHSI]

Which is of course the opinions of one individual, with no
peer-vetting :)

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after
posting. http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at
Washington University
 
Ian G Batten wrote:
> So, linking from Guy's pages, I decided to go and have a
> chortle.
>
> First attempt: ``You don't appear to have the Shockwave
> plug-in.'' OK, I've only got the Shockwave 5.0 plugin
> installed, because Shockwave is the work of the devil, so
> I followed the links and installed the latest bits.
> Shutdown the browser [*], restart, and lo, Help->About
> Plugins shows I'm now running Shockwave 6.0 r81, which is
> the latest and greatest. Visit BHIT again. It _still_ says
> I'm not running Shockwave, and offers me precisely the
> release I'm running.
>
> Clearly, BHIT care more about pushing Shockwave than
> pushing their ideas, so sadly I'll be unable to read their
> pearls of wisdom. It's sad, isn't it?
>
> Of course, were I a bad person, I'd suggest that as a
> government funded body their website should comply with
> the Disability Discrimination Act, and it's 99.9% certain
> that a site which demands Flash in order to see its front
> page isn't compliant. But making that complaint would be
> childish, wouldn't it?
>
> ian
>
> [*] Mozilla 1.6 on Solaris 10 build 55. I could put on
> Mozilla 1.7, or indeed Solaris 10 build 58. I doubt
> it'll help.
>
>
Me too! I'll never know what I'm missing. Did you also
notice that the html for even this page is invalid... no
doctype! I hope they didn't pay for this.

Steve
 
Ian G Batten <[email protected]> wrote in message news:<[email protected]>...
> So, linking from Guy's pages, I decided to go and have a
> chortle.
>
> First attempt: ``You don't appear to have the Shockwave
> plug-in.'' OK, I've only got the Shockwave 5.0 plugin
> installed, because Shockwave is the work of the devil, so
> I followed the links and installed the latest bits.
> Shutdown the browser [*], restart, and lo, Help->About
> Plugins shows I'm now running Shockwave 6.0 r81, which is
> the latest and greatest. Visit BHIT again. It _still_ says
> I'm not running Shockwave, and offers me precisely the
> release I'm running.

You can bypass the rubbish at the beginning and go straight
to the rubbish inside by going to <http://www.bhit.org/index-
home.html>.

Click on "What We Do & Why" then on "Why Helmets" and you
will see they are /still/ making the claim:

"Properly worn bicycle helmets have been shown to reduce the
risk of head injury by 85% and the risk of brain injury by
almost 90%, and are effective in all forms of crashes
including those involving a motor vehicle."

So there we are. Helmets are even more effective at
preventing brain injury than they are at preventing all
forms of head injury including.

Nasty site altogether.

--
Dave...
 
On 29 Jun 2004 02:52:00 -0700, [email protected] (Dave Kahn) wrote
in message <[email protected]>:

>"Properly worn bicycle helmets have been shown to reduce
>the risk of head injury by 85% and the risk of brain injury
>by almost 90%, and are effective in all forms of crashes
>including those involving a motor vehicle."

If anyone can find a leaflet with that printed on, it would
be covered by the code of advertising practice.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after
posting. http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at
Washington University
 
On 2004-06-29, james <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> http://www.bhit.org/mad.html "MAD riders never cycle
> without their helmets"

Why use a standard scrollbar that any browser can understand
and provide nice shortcuts for when you can write your own
in Javascript?

- Richard

--
_/_/_/ _/_/_/ _/_/_/ Richard dot Corfield at ntlworld dot
com _/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/ _/ _/ Time is a one way street, _/
_/ _/_/ _/_/_/ Except in the Twilight Zone.
 
In article <[email protected]>,
Richard Corfield <[email protected]> wrote:
> Why use a standard scrollbar that any browser can
> understand and provide nice shortcuts for when you can
> write your own in Javascript?

Because you're being paid by the hour?

ian
 
in message <[email protected]>, Ian G Batten
('[email protected]') wrote:

> In article <[email protected]
> dale.dyndns.org>, Richard Corfield
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Why use a standard scrollbar that any browser can
>> understand and provide nice shortcuts for when you can
>> write your own in Javascript?
>
> Because you're being paid by the hour?

I think, to be honest, its more about willie-waving than
billing. Peurile adolescent 'look how clever I am' showing
off. It's not just the small agencies who are guilty of this
sort of thing. Take a stroll round some of Britain's largest
and most expensive corporate web sites and you'll see it
everywhere.

--
[email protected] (Simon Brooke)
http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

;; Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.
 
In article <[email protected]>,
Simon Brooke <[email protected]> wrote:
> I think, to be honest, its more about willie-waving than
> billing.

Maybe. But I've seen a lot of ludicrously complex code in
other fields which makes me think ``contractor paid by the
hour'' or ``mmmm, job security''.

> the small agencies who are guilty of this sort of thing.
> Take a stroll round some of Britain's largest and most
> expensive corporate web sites and you'll see it
> everywhere.

But probably outsourced. Web ``designers'', who typically
know nothing about either the web or design, have convinced
otherwise sensible IT Directors that it's so esoteric only
exotic specialists can do it.

ian
 
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