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posted by LaminatorX on Thursday October 09 2014, @07:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the standards-are-nice-especially-when-they're-open dept.

Glyn Moody reports:

Back in July, I wrote about the huge win for open standards when the UK government announced that it would be adopting ODF for sharing or collaborating on government documents. I also implored the open community to support this initiative in every way it could to ensure that it took root and maybe even spread. So I'm delighted to see that Open Forum Europe has done just that with a new site called FixMyDocument.eu. (Although I am a "fellow" of the associated Open Forum Academy, I had nothing to do with this.) Here's how it explains[1] the initiative:

On this platform, you can:
Show your support for the campaign by signing the statement on open document formats.
Report web pages which fail to make documents available or accept submissions in ODF.
Consult the central listing of reported web pages.
Learn more about this campaign.

Apparently the name was inspired by my Society's FixMyStreet site where members of the public can report problems with graffiti, fly tipping, broken paving slabs, or street lighting that they come across in the UK - a great use of crowdsourced knowledge. Applying the same technique to problems with documents that people encounter is an inspired idea, and I urge people to contribute if they can.

According to a new press release (PDF) from the Open Forum Europe, this launch is part of Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW).[2]

[1][2] Horrible "web designer" page; unreadable without a background image, or Ctrl-A, or a No Style setting.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Thursday October 09 2014, @07:31PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Thursday October 09 2014, @07:31PM (#104181) Journal

    Any suggestion on software to make horrible pages like "http://openparl2014.org/faq [openparl2014.org]" readable "on the fly" without resorting to Ctrl-A and other bandaid?

    Some tidbits from the html code:
    "BLOG DETAILS: http://openparl2014.org/ [openparl2014.org] THEME DETAILS: Magazine by Olle Ota"
    The usual suspects in html code clutters and image source spying is present in the page: twitter, facebook and tumblr.

    Seems like a good project however. Albeit with some webproducer that produced spaghetti html.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by dyingtolive on Thursday October 09 2014, @08:26PM

      by dyingtolive (952) on Thursday October 09 2014, @08:26PM (#104199)

      What's bad about it? I briefly opened it up, more curious about the warning than anything, and it looks readable to me. I mean, I haven't looked at the code or anything, but visibly, there's no more "Web 2.0" garbage in it than any site nowadays.

      Are you reading it in lynx or something?

      --
      Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @08:37PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @08:37PM (#104203)

        I agree, the layout was... sub par, but not even close to unreadable.

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by dyingtolive on Thursday October 09 2014, @08:41PM

          by dyingtolive (952) on Thursday October 09 2014, @08:41PM (#104206)

          I think they're talking about the code. I went back and viewed source. Roughly about 25% of the FAQ page is content. The rest is Javascript and style.

          --
          Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Friday October 10 2014, @02:16AM

            by Arik (4543) on Friday October 10 2014, @02:16AM (#104287) Journal
            That does appear to be correct, and that's all *inline* script btw. It also attempted to pull in scripts from tumbler and google. I have no idea how much more that would have been had I allowed it to be downloaded. Utterly ridiculous.

            But the nice thing is that by having my browser set to ignore such things I actually get what I was looking for and it's perfectly readable.

            When people complain that noscript breaks pages, I reply I find it more often fixes them, and this is exactly what I mean.

            You have to go beyond mere perversion of HTML and put some effort into actively defiling it in order for it to break. 
            --
            If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
      • (Score: 2) by forsythe on Thursday October 09 2014, @10:57PM

        by forsythe (831) on Thursday October 09 2014, @10:57PM (#104238)

        Interestingly enough, the site seems to work just fine in w3m (and lynx, since you mention it). There seem to be some pointless social media iframes floating around, but there's text, and I can read it.

        Others have spoken to the code quality though, so I don't need to go into that. Perhaps it's also less usable if javascript is enabled.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Friday October 10 2014, @02:26AM

        by Marand (1081) on Friday October 10 2014, @02:26AM (#104291) Journal

        What's bad about it? I briefly opened it up, more curious about the warning than anything, and it looks readable to me. I mean, I haven't looked at the code or anything, but visibly, there's no more "Web 2.0" garbage in it than any site nowadays.

        Are you reading it in lynx or something?

        Out of curiosity, I looked at the site with links2 -g (X11 mode), links2 (text mode), elinks, w3m, lynx, Chromium (full JS), Firefox (no JS), Opera 12, and uzbl. It was readable in all, degrading well enough that I was able to read it without issue with every browser.

        In order:
        1) Chromium, Opera, and uzbl, all using full JS, providing the expected sort of experience. Two similar engines (Blink and Webkit), but even the old Opera 12 (Presto) looked and acted fine.
        2) Firefox with no JS. Still readable, nothing particularly strange. Degraded cleanly
        3) links2. in the X11 mode, showed relevant images, order was fine, colours were readable, and links/content were still organised cleanly.
        4) In text mode, elinks and links2 had the best formatting. Both were readable and organised fine, and they mostly hid the weird bits of "web 2.0" cruft.
        5) w3m and lynx were the worst, but only slightly. Still organised in a usable way, they just had some random Web2.0 bits hanging around that elinks and links2 left out.

        Finally, the bonus round:
        6) curl http://openparl2014.org/faq# [openparl2014.org] | less. Completely unreadable! What the hell were they thinking?!

        I have no idea what the complaints are about, are people viewing the FAQ with Internet Explorer 5?

        ---

        The main page, however, is a Web 2.0 abomination . If it were any more social it would move into your house and drink all your milk.

        Oddly enough, when I did the same tests on the main page (openparl2014.org), elinks and links2 -g did pretty well despite the JS-heavy web 2.0 crap-fest. lynx and w3m hid under the bed and cried. Firefox+NoScript took one look at the site and said some obscene things about my family, but at least it gave me the navigation part before refusing to cooperate.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by tibman on Thursday October 09 2014, @08:39PM

      by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 09 2014, @08:39PM (#104204)

      It looks like black text on a light-gray background to me. Very readable.

      --
      SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 10 2014, @06:50AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 10 2014, @06:50AM (#104347)

        Can't go wrong with NoScript + RequestPolicy.

    • (Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday October 09 2014, @11:47PM

      by Arik (4543) on Thursday October 09 2014, @11:47PM (#104255) Journal
      They are both clean and legible for me with no tweaking. I dont allow javascript and I dont allow documents to specify fonts.
      --
      If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
    • (Score: 2) by joshuajon on Friday October 10 2014, @03:27PM

      by joshuajon (807) on Friday October 10 2014, @03:27PM (#104505)

      Magazine by Olle Otta is a Tumblr theme. This page - http://openparl2014.org/ [openparl2014.org] - is in fact a Tumblr blog with a custom domain. The code is generated by Tumblr and the theme is from a third party theme designer.

      I recognized this fact because it's a technique I've used myself for free web hosting.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by tibman on Thursday October 09 2014, @08:41PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 09 2014, @08:41PM (#104207)

    The url seems to be incorrect. FixMyDocument.eu should be FixMyDocuments.eu

    --
    SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.