BBC site redesign, px font sizes (edited - inaccurate)

The BBC news website has changed its style this morning, and now has the greyish text and increased line spacing that is all the rage on Web 2.0 sites.  

In an idle moment, I had a look at the stylesheet.  I'm not a web styling expert, but I need to sort out the stylesheets for theIntelligentBook.com.  Interestingly, the BBC's font size and line height are specified in pixels – years ago that was said to be a no-no because 13px might not be so readable on a denser display or a handheld.  But trying to use "em" measurements or anything like that was horribly incompatible between browsers.  These days, Safari and Firefox still happily resize text smaller or larger when asked (Ctrl-+), even if it is specified in pixels.  So I wonder if the "old pixel" has become the new standard resolution-independent measurement: "how big would this have looked on an old SVGA monitor"?  

EDITED: Oops, as bods commented, it is mostly em-based after all (but with occasional stray px font-sizes for parts like ".storyextra h2" that I happened to hit in my initial idle look)

Northern Rock nationalised – what an opportunity

The government is going to nationalise Northern Rock, but the opposition think this is a "disaster" and takes us "back to the policies of the 1970s".  

I think it's a fabulous move, and a very capitalist one.  The difference between the 1970s and now is that in the 1970s, the government felt it needed to own industries as a whole and there was no private competition.  In the 1980s, the government changed plan and backed off industry entirely, relying just on regulation and competition.  I think now there's an opportunity to realise that governments can do something slightly more than just regulation: they can get their feet wet in the market and be competition.

What would this do for the everyday citizen?  It's a very effective way of ensuring consumer minimum standards in an industry – much faster than regulation, and potentially more effective.

For example in Australia there is a problem with bank fees – not just for overdrafts, but just for accessing your money.  And these bank fees, as always, hit lower income earners hardest.  The Australian government would have a hard time pushing through regulations to outlaw bank fees – there would be law suits for judicial review complaining loudly that it's "not a viable commercial model".  But what if the Australian government still owned a bank (it used to own the Commonwealth Bank), and told it not to charge bank fees?  The private sector, just to compete for customers, would have to drop their bank fees too.  And by running a profit-making non-fee-charging bank, the government would prove that it is a commercially viable model.

Competition can be more effective than regulation, but if the public wants to drive the industry in its direction, then the public sector has to get its feet wet.

And now that Northern Rock has had to be nationalised, I hope the UK government will realise just how useful it could be to them.

Quantum of Solace

My goodness, it's the most exciting name for a new Bond film, is it?

Apparently it comes from a short story that Ian Fleming wrote, which of course is why the producers chose it. On the other hand, the short story never had to stand on its own - it was published in a much more excitingly titled collection, and in a popular magazine (Cosmopolitan).

I keep imagining that gravelly American voiceover they always have on movie trailers trying to announce the title dramatically: "Danger... excitement... QUANTUM ... OF SOLACE". Will I be able to keep a straight face? Unless of course the villain is a very nerdy academic physicist in which case it all makes sense!

Wiki parsers (this post is a bit technical)

I've been changing the wiki engine the Intelligent Book uses -- I had been using a slightly altered version of JSPWiki -- and the question of what makes a good wiki engine has come up. For the moment, I've been putting something together using Radeox, since that seems to be the most commonly used library. But I really don't like it.

Part of my prejudice is that the documentation has fallen off the web because the project lead (Stephan Schmidt) has left his employer (Fraunhofer) and is still negotiating the rights to the code. But more essentially, I'm not a fan of its design: each piece of syntax recognises a kind of regular expression, replaces it in the text with some output, and then passes it on to the next filter or macro in the chain. This sounds nice and simple, but some annoying things can happen -- for example, a macro that outputs HTML including Javascript is very likely to get trodden on by later filters: characters like "[" and "]" in the Javascript can be misinterpreted as link tags by the later Wiki filters.

Adam Megacz at Berkeley has produced a formal scannerless parser that can be configured to parse Wiki markup (most parser generators cannot) -- but it's a little bit like cobbly PhD software, and in practice it seems to be very slow parsing its grammar file. Also, requiring wiki installations to define formal grammars for their markup just doesn't sound right. Formal grammars are the exclusive domain of computer scientists; wikis are supposed to be more accessible than that.

I'm getting tempted to go down a different route (I have a cunning plan for a much better approach!) but for the moment I don't have time, so I guess I'll struggle on with Radeox and just keep grumbling for now.

Elections, elections, bureaucracies

So it seems as thought both Australia and (perhaps) the UK are heading into elections. I've always found it curiously comical that although the UK and Australia have usually had the opposite party in power since the late 70s, the outcomes have all been pretty similar -- interest rates have tracked largely the same in both countries, as have employment figures, and the political agenda (crises about petrol prices and illegal immigration being on the agenda in both countries at similar times...).

It reminds me of Michael Portillo's comment on This Week a year or so ago. He was asked his opinion about why Blair ended up being at odds with Europe when before 1997 he'd campaigned so vigorously that Britain should co-operate more with the EU. Portillo said that he wasn't surprised because he [Portillo] has always been "a great believer in bureaucracies" -- in other words, the issue is always bigger than the politician. It doesn't matter if Tony was pro-Europe in his heart, when he was in power he was there to argue for Britain's interests and they were different from France's interests and so, sure enough, he ended up having rows with Chirac all the time.

But this leaves me feeling vaguely powerless at the polls. Not only won't my vote make much difference (because I live in a "safe seat"), but even if I did change the government, the outcome would be pretty similar. On reflection, maybe I'll go back to pretending that whether Darling or Osborne (and Costello or Swan) is chancellor is going to determine whether I'll be wealthy or destitute in five years time...

Blog comments

I noticed a curious thing with Blogger's comment system -- although there are "anonymous" and "leave a name, but I don't have a log-in" options, it defaults to asking you to log in. I wonder how many people click "comment", see the log-in box, and run away, never noticing they don't have to log in after all.

Naturally I wonder this mostly for other blogs -- the five or so people who read this one wouldn't make much of a sample! :)

ALT-C, My presentation

My presentation slot was at 9am on the final morning of the conference. Happily I had an interested audience (if a little small), and made some contacts to follow up on after the talk.

I'd been slightly worried that with the conference dinner going late into the evening before, and having to clear out of our accommodation by 10am, maybe there'd only be me and the other presenter in the room as everyone would either have stayed in bed, been packing their bags, or already have hit the road homewards. Thankfully, learning technology conference attendees are more dedicated than that though!