Avoiding a lifetime of Failed Redesigns

I’ve had my tussles with Denton over the years (it has now been a period of years), but apparently because he is a British invert and also because he understands that disagreements need not get in the way of business, we still talk. Or rather I still ping him on AIM when something comes up. He agrees with me a lot of the time and tends to fix the errors I find (as does his deputy, the nonhomosexualist Lockhart Steele [no relation]).

In July he shitcanned a Gawker editor (Jesse Oxfeld, the homosexualist one) and later shitcanned an entire site, Sploid. The press coverage mentioned Gawker Media’s homegrown content-management system (CMS); its codename somewhat offends my sensibilities and would make this posting a magnet for disturbing search requests, hence I shall elide it.

Why write one’s own CMS? Because “[t]he open-source publishing systems upon which most Weblogs depend cannot handle larger and more sophisticated sites.” That means you, WordPress, which I know for a fact was tested more than once on Gawker sites.

Fine. They’re writing their own, outsourcing a lot of the work to the ancien Communist Bloc. Fine. But if you’re gonna spend all that money, I want that fucker to be perfect. As I already told Denton and Steele:

    *

      Full ATAG compliance. That means Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines. I got up Anil Dash’s nose about it (since Six Apart has more money than God and could have been in compliance two major versions ago), to no avail. I wrote an analysis (Wiki version) of WordPress’s ATAG compliance – for free, I might add, though by mentioning that I expect one of my legion of detractors to issue the paradoxical accusation that I am shilling for money.

      I know the head of the ATAG Working Group personally and I can very much assure you that this is no WCAG we’re dealing with here; they are competent people. ATAG is a complex specification, but it is at least rational much of the time. It has also been completely ignored; not a single thing complies with it. Time for another Gawker first, I should think.

      This is not a hypothetical issue. A custom CMS is an authoring tool, and a lot of us are getting tired of putting the onus for accessibility on Web-content authors when the puzzle has had two other pieces – authoring tools and user agents (browsers) – all along. Time to step up to the plate.

      And since I’m using a baseball metaphor, here’s how I explained it to Denton: Someday you may want to start up a blog about baseball. It so happens that a notable baseball writer, Sarah Morris, has severe cerebral palsy and uses extensive computer adaptations to write. You cannot assume that your talent pool will always consist of New York Jews, homosexualists, and the few extant hipsterish straight guys. Accessibility is all about making things work for people who are not exactly like you or your heeb/homo/hipster posse.

      It is very difficult to retrofit a CMS for accessibility. It’s almost unimaginably difficult. Don’t screw this up. You’ve got more than enough people working on the project to fit this in.
    *

      Better Web standards. Listen, I’m all in favour of Patric(k) King and Su’s recent site architectures (plural), based as they are on recognized Web standards, but you have to improve on that. Fundamental concepts like document semantics seem unattainable on Gawker blogs, where every single thing is a paragraph, a heading at a fixed and invariant level, or a block quotation. Gawker is responsible for some seriously anti-hypertextual “innovations” like clustering links at the end of the post (a regression dutifully copied by that derivative vanity blog, Tropolism); if you really have to do that, which you don’t, then use an unordered list.

      When I gave Jonno perfect HTML for last year’s Consumer Guide to BigMuscle(Bears), the existing CMS choked on it – and all it used was a definition list. (Another such Consumer Guide is coming, by the way.)

      I also want better feeds (including valid Atom – mine are), with none of this advertising nonsense.
    *

      Better approximation of a real Web site. It boggles my mind that Gawker comment fields not only strip out all HTML, they convert things like smart quotes to dumb quotes and refuse to let you use anything that isn’t in a 1987-era ASCII character set. Should a comment field on a commercial blog act like an IBM Selectric typewriter?
    *

      Better accessibility. Why is there no such thing as a graphic inside a Gawker Media post with an alt text? At one point this summer, the soon-to-be-shitcanned Oxfeld’s postings were showing up on Gawker with images missing, allowing the world to see the filenames that acted as alternate text. How unclear on the concept do you have to be not to provide an alt text for a graphic?

      The new CMS should force authors to write an alt text, which they should be trained to do properly. (It isn’t hard. But if you want to go deep, I wrote the most extensive guide in existence, though there are shorter ones.)
    *

      Better blogging. Slugs on Gawker blogs have to be the worst thing ever, and there isn’t a single person I’ve dealt with at that empire who even knew what they were when I asked. A slug – it’s an old newspaper term – is the short filename for a post. Except they aren’t short; they’re every word in the title connected by dashes, to which are appended another dash, a control number, and .php.

      The most egregious example I could find? www.gawker.com/news/advertising/procter–gamble-ready-for-your-stinky-secret-187834.php. The ampersand in the original title disappeared, giving us two dashes in a row, and the whole thing’s a mile long. Blogger is notorious for doing the same thing. In fact, everything but a full install of WordPress falls prey to the same ailment, and even WordPress does it wrong by default unless you intervene.

      This is one area in which I have no compunctions at all in saying I lead the entire fucking blogosphere. I sit there and think about the slugs I’m going to use, which scarcely ever exceed three words and usually boil down to just one. Some of them are even clever (a kind of Easter egg), and all of them:
          o fit on a single line in an E-mail even without the need for surrounding < and > characters
          o fit on a line in a narrow chat window
          o are hackable (try backspacing out each component from right to left), readable, and manually typable
          o can be dictated over the phone

      Gawker slugs fail on all counts. The new CMS should force the author to write one- or two-word slugs.

The lesson here is simple. If you’re big enough to fire people, close down entire blogs, and reject the existing software platforms and write your own, then you have to do things right. Otherwise you’re setting yourself up for a lifetime of Failed Redesigns.

http://blog.fawny.org/2006/09/01/denton-advice/

The hell is this?

>>2
Awesome hotblooded faggotry.

TLDR;

now I need to find my 10 bucks, OH WAI-

>>3

Awesome, indeed.

tl;dr

I read this shit.

why?

The list of vaguely risible fanboy habits I share with heterosexualist males may hereby begin with the following: I adore Lynne Russell and everything she does!

[Raven-haired woman in low-cut red blazer (also with visible captions)]

The überglam karatekatrix/newsreadtrix/vixentrix fatale was last seen in the mid-’90s modelling her latest hair tint as she statuesquely delivered updates on CNN Headline News. After leaving the business, Russell moved to Canada with her husband. But now she’s back doing fill-in on CBC Newsworld and oh, mother of God am I excited! I tape her shows! I dissect her accent!

Canada’s mosaic approach to multiculturalism works better than the American melting-pot approach and there is one manifestation of the mosaic that may surprise you: We put people on TV who speak in accents. Yes, of course everybody has an accent, but I mean detectable accents. An interpreter often heard during news conferences and the like speaks British English. A hostess of a science show, who resembles a transvestite even more strongly than Russell does, is British. We had an Australian business newscastrix for a while, and a Newsworld weathercastrix is from New Zealand.

On-air diversity, while requiring improvement, can be seen and heard. American networks hire Canadians, whose accents seem pleasingly neutral (hence officially do not exist), but you scarcely ever find a detectable accent on American television. The Australians, despite their decades of institutional racism, are more in the Canadian model, as Norman Hermant, late of CBC, is now a reporter there. I have heard a vast range of newsreader and announcer accents in England.

But Russell’s accent surely is not undetectable. It fairly screams, and I don’t think it is my linguistics degree and my mild otaku for this shit that causes me to notice. She really sounds like an American, a fact I note but do not object to. Let’s transcribe a few examples, using, of course, International Phonetic Alphabet. Good luck getting your browser to display them.

    * Most disturbing is Russell’s mispronunciation of the title of an elected head of a province (and some territories), premier. It’s pronounced exactly one way, “preemyer,” a lesson only some recent U.S. ambassadors to Canada have bothered to learn. It is not pronounced in the various hodgepodges Americans use for that word and the related premiere (“premeer,” “premyare”). Russell pronounces it “primyeer” [ˌprɪmˈjiːr] or “premeer”
    * Back vowels (chiefly [aː] → [ɑː]), sort of like a Buffalonian: not, conflict (n.), economic, Ontario, jobs (also Jobs), Lebanon, dollar, technologies, solid, consolidate, Squamish (lots of stress on first syllable)
    * Ottawa [ˈɑːɾɘˌwɘ]
    * Saskatchewan (tricky to transcribe; much stress on final vowel) [sæsˌkæʧˈwɑːn]
    * No Canadian raising audible whatsoever (as in subtitles [ˌsʌbˈta͡ɪɾl̩z] – yes, she conveniently uttered that word)

Russell is also required to utter Canadianisms like “hydro” for electricity and “Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry.” Then there was this humdinger, heard as I was writing this (2006.09.07 16:10): “How’s it gonna play with the American – ‘with the American.’ How’s it gonna play with the Canadian public?” Delightfully, that’s how!

http://blog.fawny.org/2006/09/07/lrdw/

You’d be surprised how difficult it is to explain why subtitled movies must also be captioned.

    *

      The Brits and Irish cannot even express the concept, as subtitling is called subtitling but captioning is, too. They’re wrong, of course, and have been all along. This isn’t a cute little dialect difference (boot/trunk, elevator/lift) that a descriptive linguist could champion as a fascinating form of language diversity. They’re using the same word for two different things, making them impossible to distinguish. (“I’ve never liked watching subtitles.” Quick: What does that mean?)

      This failure to distinguish two separate things leads to inanities like the Irish broadcast regulator’s claiming that subtitling levels on TV should be increased while limited amounts of captioning could be permitted. All of it is captioning and it’s what they’ve been watching all along.
    *

      French has only one word for captioning and subtitling, sous-titrage. You can use sous-titrage codé for closed captioning, but doing so limits you to a discussion only of that, not of captioning in general.
    *

      Then of course there’s the bullshit on Wikipedia, but I shall leave that for another day.

How does this apply to CBC?

Well, the captioning department is run by a Francophone. She speaks English with a rather modest accent and has good fluency. Nevertheless, the sous-titrage/sous-titrage distinction is in there somewhere, and I believe that first-language interference is partly to blame for CBC’s refusal to caption subtitled programming. There seems to be an official belief, grounded in nothing but rampant ignorance, that subtitles are captions. Yes, perhaps they are – at a taverne on rue Ontario est or in the National Assembly or at the Centre Pompidou, but not here.

Why are subtitles not captions? I’ve explained this over and over again, and I challenge anyone to disprove even a single item on this list of differences:

   1. Captions are intended for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences. The assumed audience for subtitling is hearing people who do not understand the language of dialogue.
   2. Captions move to denote who is speaking; subtitles are almost always set at bottom centre.
   3. Captions can explicitly state the speaker’s name:
         1. [MARTIN]
         2. >> Announcer:
         3. ORIGINAL CAST OF "ANNIE":
   4. Captions notate sound effects and other dramatically significant audio. Subtitles assume you can hear the phone ringing, the footsteps outside the door, or a thunderclap.
   5. Subtitles are usually open (permanent, always visible). Captions are usually closed (selectable; you can turn them on or off). Closed subtitles, however, are now more numerous due to the popularity of DVDs.
   6. Captions are usually in the same language as the audio. Subtitles are usually a translation.
   7. Subtitles also translate onscreen type in another language, e.g., a sign tacked to a door, a computer monitor display, a newspaper headline, or opening credits.
   8. Subtitles never mention the source language. A film with dialogue in multiple languages will feature continuous subtitles that never indicate that the source language has changed. (Or only dialogue in one language will be subtitled.)
   9. Captions tend to actually transcribe and render utterances in a foreign language, or transliterate that dialogue if a different writing system is used, or state the name of the language being spoken.
  10. Captioning aims to render all utterances. Subtitles are selective and do not bother to duplicate some verbal forms, e.g., proper names uttered in isolation (“Jacques!”), words repeated (“Help! Help! Help!”), song lyrics, phrases or utterances in the target language, or phrases the worldly hearing audience is expected to know (“Danke schön”).
  11. Captions render tone and manner of voice where necessary:
         1. ( whispering )
         2. [BRITISH ACCENT]
         3. [ Vincent, Narrating ]
         4. (Sings like Elvis)
  12. A subtitled program can be captioned (subtitles first, captions later). Captioned programs aren’t subtitled after captioning.

If you’re a deaf viewer watching a subtitled movie without captions, well, you end up asking yourself a lot of questions:

    * Why did that man get up from the couch and open the front door?
    * What prompted that teenager to pull a cellphone out of her purse and press it to her ear?
    * Whyever did that driver pull over to the curb?
    * Why is that starlet wearing a headset microphone and dancing onstage?
    * What was the answer to that question?

Remember: Subtitlers view their job as one of explicitly limiting and minimizing the information represented in subtitles. Hence, as a matter of ideology, they leave out non-speech information (knock on door, ringing phone, siren); they often refuse to subtitle songs or music; and, when translating well-known source languages, they refuse to subtitle common words that, self-evidently, everyone can hear and understand. As a consequence, a deaf viewer may never find out whodunit, since the prosecuting attorney’s plain questioning (“Did you kill your wife?”) will elicit an answer that is never written down.

Unless, of course, you caption the subtitled program.

Here is CBC’s official bullshit excuse for refusing to do that:

    Sub-titled [sic] programming is not further captioned in normal circumstances. While some individuals may prefer more text to cover the video images, it is CBC’s view that, on balance, the marginal gain from the addition of captioning for the hearing impaired is outweighed by the additional video lost.

Apparently these people think that all the original dialogue will be transcribed and presented in captions. How stupid is that? But this implied claim is disproven even by the very few subtitled movies CBC shows with captions, which attempt to caption some non-speech information (NSI) but almost never render any utterances (not even oui or non).

But since this is CBC captioning we’re talking about – a subset of Canadian captioning, which, for prerecorded shows, is already bad enough – the Corpse does not limit itself to one error at a time. CBC is the kind of place that never screws up just one way when it can do a twofer instead. So they’ll do crazy shit like add captions to a subtitled show (NSI only), but use scrollup captioning that just sits there for a couple of minutes after the audio is heard (Lovers of the Arctic Circle, 2006.08.24):
Subtitle reads Shit! as captions, separated by a blank line, read (metal clank) and (headlight shattering)
Subtitle: One afternoon I finally listened to Otto. Caption: >> (Spanish television)

Because obviously it is too difficult to issue a clearing pulse and delete the captions from the screen.

And even though it is quite easy to caption a subtitled show – all you have to do is sit there and play it, filling in the blanks here and there – they still cannot be bothered to individually time and place the 15 or 20 or 60 captions required in such a case. (A two-hour movie in one language has 1,200 to 1,800 captions.) Like Coronation Street, subtitled shows are the kind of programming that isn’t good enough for pop-on captions.

There are, in fact, a lot of tricky issues in captioning a subtitled show, but the way things are going now, CBC will never even hear what those issues are. (Maybe the Francophone head of captioning should stop me and chat instead of just nodding at me the next time she plainly recognizes me as I walk through the captioning department.)

The Vlug decision required CBC Television and Newsworld to caption everything, not many or most things. Every second of the broadcast day must be captioned. CBC staff and managers are not empowered to exempt entire genres of programming from captioning because they’re too French, too stubborn, too inept, or too ignorant to do what they are legally required to do. CBC is not permitted to decide, “on balance,” that added captions are too much to read. Irrespective of the reason, absent captioning on subtitled programming is, all by itself, proof that CBC is in noncompliance with its requirements.

Now, the question is: Why the fuck am I the only one who cares?

IN B4 BEL-AIR.

I allowed him to pull me up onto my knees and I widened the stance of my legs, opening wide to him. My chest was flat against the sheets, and my arms were flung out wide, my fists gathering and releasing bunches of bedspread and sheeting in rhythm with the furious stroking that he, on his knees between my legs, was applying with that long, draggy cock of his inside me. As I knew it would, that cock of his was putting me in the mood for him. I cried out for him, loving those long deep strokes. I writhed underneath him, as he plowed me hard and long. I loved the feel of the sliding uncut cock inside me.
 
With a cry of exultation, he came inside me, flooding me, no need for any protection between us now beyond the rings of pledge on our fingers.
 
We collapsed on the bed, and he stroked me off to ejaculation with his hand. The loving, caring partner. I could feel him stirring again, and he wanted more, but one of us had to be sensible. He had a class to go teach and I needed to get to work on the new chapter of my novel.

LGBT2SQQQBLMORMORSS&S and sometimes Y

I’m willing to go for “gay and lesbian” where “queer” is somehow inappropriate. I draw the line at that, and any set of Scrabble tiles masquerading as an acronym representing our diverse communities (LGBTTQQI2S*) is intellectual fraud. T people aren’t gay people, and neither are I or 2S. Sorry. When the deaf become the blind and Canadians become Icelanders, then we’ll talk. (And if you’re several of those things at once, bravo! You’re the exception that alters the rule not one whit.)

My esteemed colleague agrees with me. He put untold hours of effort into the design of a varsity jacket for this, the least exclusive club since the one straight people started up. (And almost as much effort getting WordPress.com to publish his blog entry correctly. It still isn’t 100%.)

Purple varsity jacket with green sleeves and rainbow cuffs is emblazoned with a crest of overlappping triangles, a labyris, and intertwined male and female symbols and the letters L G B T 2S Q Q Q B L M OR M·OR SS&S Y

Or perhaps you’d just like a crest for your manpurse?

Framed crest has overlappping triangles, a labyris, and intertwined male and female symbols

For markup enthusiasts only: LGBT2SQQQBLMORMORSS&SY. :'''(

http://blog.fawny.org/2006/09/17/alphabet-soup/

(damn, I hate being banned from world4chan (trolling this time, lol), maybe I should use real proxies instead of Tor, all its endpoints are banned for CP (except this one ;) ))

>>13
stfu noob

shitty thread wasshoi

Bringing /prog/ back to its people