DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

One of the most irritating arguments I hear against efforts to increase privacy is beautifully summed up, and eviscerated by Dan Gillmor (SJ Mercury News columnist) in Want Privacy? Take Action:

Another scenario is the “forget about it” system, which holds that privacy is gone and we might as well get used to it. In this world, you do have a choice if you don’t enjoy having your every move tracked, and your data dispersed widely. But the choice is absurd, since it prevents access to the benefits of society, not just the drawbacks of lost privacy.

(The choice, which Gillmor does not describe, is to pull a Kaczynski — basically, move to a remote shack in Montana and live a somewhat bad-smelling life among the wildebeests and lack of plumbing. To be clear, it is not necessary to send explosives through the mail to adopt this pro-privacy stance.)

I spent the weekend (2 weeks ago) designing a new website — something I have not done since this journal went online in late 2000.

Here’s the site: stlouiscelticcross.com

It uses CSS heavily, but not exclusively. I would have expected CSS support in modern browsers to be a lot further along than it is, given that CSS was introduced in 1996. But the process of making a CSS-based site look right in even the recent browsers makes for a frustrating, teeth-gnashing, no-fun weekend.

The art of CSS is the art of piling hacks upon hacks, without having the whole mess come crumbling down. (Tip: just load up your CSS-based site in IE5/Win to see Eiffel-tower-as-pick-up-sticks.) CSS authors, perhaps due to their backgrounds as designers (by which I mean: non-programmers), seem to seek out cross-platform compatibility within the stylesheet itself, rather than doing what I would consider more natural, because I’ve had to do it for most web projects for the past seven years: detecting on the server side what browser is being used, and serving up customized content to fit.

I see the appeal of the client-side solution. I recently discovered that an old site of mine, which used browser detection on the server to tweak the javascript-based navigation, was failing in Mozilla 0.9.X because I hadn’t had the foresight, in 1998, to predict that ‘Mozilla/5' would eventually be widely used. (And in my defense, it still isn’t!) The client-side solutions advocated by designers appear to be less likely to suffer from this sort of version-specific breakage, in that the hacks they employ tend to be based on capabilities rather than version numbers. In other words, any browser with the specific capability will work, regardless of its version number — so, in theory, 5 years from now the page will work for everyone, even though its CSS has not been tweaked to accomodate the pecularities of newer browsers. Of course, this very much remains to be seen.

Hacks upon hacks… here is a crash-course:

• the @import hack: Hide the stylesheet from old browsers, which would mangle their output anyway, by referencing the CSS in a way that only more-modern browsers understand.
• Tantek Çelik’s box model hack, which “takes advantage of a CSS parsing bug in IE5/Windows and IE5.5/Windows” to serve CSS rules specific to those browsers, without breaking browsers that actually do a competent job of rendering CSS.
• the DOCTYPE hack, which requires CSS authors to sift through dozens of contradictory choices just to pick an appropriate first line for an HTML file. Fortunately, Pete Zeldman has done the heavy lifting on this one, reducing the universe of choices down to a manageable 7.
• the CSS2 selector hack, which hides CSS rules from IE5/Win, which does not understand CSS2 selectors.

Sharp-eyed readers may recognize the core design of the stlouiscelticcross.com site. See the site’s colophon for the credits.

If there’s a final lesson in all this, it is, as it has been for years, test your site. I spent 4 hours implementing the original site, which looked great in Mozilla/MacOS… and then another day trying to make the site work in IE/Win. Perhaps my mistake was in not designing for IE/Win originally — although my experience indicates that the various versions of that browser are so broken in so many different ways, it probably would not have helped.

Following up on Friday’s piece about the death of the web search industry, I discovered an excellent example of just how dismal the prospect of pay-to-play submissions can be.

Ask Jeeves and Teoma share this Site Submit page. It describes their fee-based submission tool with a few bullet-pointed features:

• “Submit up to 1,000 different URLs for inclusion”
• “One-time fee ensures a full year of inclusion in this powerful database”

They require the user to click through before they explain that the “one-time fee” is charged per URL. Meaning, if you follow their suggestion and submit 1,000 URLs, they’ll invoice you for — I’m not kidding — $18,012.

You need not ever refresh or update your pages; presumably they’ll index your stale old crap over and over again, all year, ensuring that the “latest, best content is always available to our users”. Or, as necessary, the outdated, uninteresting, poorly-formed content published by someone with $18,012 to blow.

(At this point I picture Jeeves standing insouciantly in his tuxedo, before an open bottle of chrome polish… in one hand he holds a chamois, in the other, a turd.)

Another day, another snapshot of nowhere-but-here… inside the “goddess store,” among the herbal aphrodisiacs, eclectic potions, and books about sensuality, I spied a glass jar labelled “Tangerine Love Balm.” And as I begin to imagine how this product would be used, I see a sticker on the cap reading SAMPLER.

Heh.

In November of 2000 I created a list of the add-URL forms for what I considered to be the major, free, general-purpose search engines. I used those links frequently to submit websites for indexing.

I don’t do much website promotion any more, so I have not had any need to maintain my bookmarks. But today I revisited the list. I found that only three of the seven still offer free submissions. I was surprised — I know the web industry has been decimated, but it was still a shock to see it up close.

These still work: Alta-Vista, Northern Light, and Google.

Excite and Go now use Overture, aka GoTo.com, the “search engine” of paid placements. HotBot accepts no submissions. Lycos charges a fee. Inktomi charges a fee.

Missing in action: InfoSeek was part of Go.com, but Disney pulled the plug after Go.com lost $1 Billion (!).

Promising newcomers Teoma and WiseNut have succumbed to acquisition; AskJeeves purchased Teoma (which now charges a fee for sumbissions); LookSmart purchased WiseNut although WiseNut still offers free sumbissions. (I don’t expect that to last. LookSmart charges for directory submissions.)

I’m not simply lamenting the end of the free. Rather, I think it is hugely valuable and important to be able to search an archive of websites indexed by relevance, not by bid. It’s apparently possible for software (e.g. google’s PageRank) to intelligently find relevant content — and that’s what I want to see. I’d even pay for the privilege. Just don’t serve me advertising and call it “search results.”