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johndrinkwater

Listed below are comments made by johndrinkwater between Wednesday, 18th March 2009 and Friday, 9th October 2009.

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Strictly Come Dancing: Strictly Social 12:44pm on 09 Oct 2009 You’re encouraging people to Boo? How wrong is that.
RealMedia - an update 2:27pm on 08 Oct 2009 How depressing that the Beeb had a decade to work on better solutions and yet they migrated to worse ones!
After the News24 channel stopped streaming with Real I could no longer watch it. It wasn’t just for the horrible performance from Flash (it would make my netbook crawl), but the bitrates aswell - it would consistently stop playback for buffering making it unwatchable - rather than adapt like RM did. Now i’m stuck only being able to watch the odd selection you have on the iPlayer (via my PS3, the only device I have left with Flash on)

Real
Reach: Low, no idea
Quality: Reasonable, but it worked
Impact: Brilliant
Value: Valuable

Flash
Reach: ~90%
Quality: Awful
Impact: Reasonable when it works
Value: Not

WMedia
Reach: <90%
Quality: No idea, don’t have Windows
Impact: ^
Value: Not

And you’re shutting down the last remaining channels? humorous.
BBCHD and DRM: A Response to Cory Doctorow 3:59pm on 03 Oct 2009 ‘and haven't tabled these proposals lightly’
The existence of any proposals at all means the BBC have already left the side of the licence fee payers.
HTML 5 and timed media 1:06pm on 13 Aug 2009 Saw open.bbc.co.uk/rad/demos/html5/rdtv/episode2/index.html linked by HTML5 WG member, absolutely love that you’re investigating this so early. It would really encourage me though if the site worked without requiring javascript, as no programme links are brought down.

For video accessibility and synced media, it would be best for the BBC to contact http://blog.gingertech.net/ as she is working for Mozilla is that regard.

nb today an Opera employee asked for addCueRange to be removed from the spec as it isnt suitably specced. All that would imply is that it still needs work, any input should be made at WHATWG mailing list.
Pic of the Day: Mixed Characters 3:53pm on 07 Aug 2009 ‘Smart quotes’? You mean actual correct British quotes and apostrophes?
It may be more correct to say:

‘As brownedov has noticed you can now use pound signs, typographically correct quotes, nested quotes, and other “unicode” characters when making comments on BBC blogs.’

Which, if you understood British nesting rules, when unquoting my line it would be:

As brownedov has noticed you can now use pound signs, typographically correct quotes, nested quotes, and other ‘unicode’ characters when making comments on BBC blogs.
Radio 4 as an antidote to Twitter panel games 4:29pm on 06 Jun 2009 RIP Humph.
From 'Taleban' to 'Taliban' 3:13pm on 02 Jun 2009 Soo, what lead the BBC to use Taleban in the first place? Was it the recognised correct international English version? Is it just a transliteration choice your intl department made?
Why do you give up on a decision just because other people are doing things differently?
Does this mean youll further accept Americanisations as weve been seeing on the news recently with examples such as: Space Truck to describe ESAs ATV. hiccups seen on BBC article, etc.
Stand by your own choices.
Changes to our blogs 4:01pm on 23 Mar 2009 As one of many people on my platform (Linux), along with MacOS users, confused at your use of extended ASCII still. Everything on my system, by default from install, is set to en_GB.UTF8 so I have no problems with any British characters, British punctuation (‘’“” etc), and currency £ using applications and websites.

So why are we penalised because you cant spend the time to find a solution? It has been many months since the blogs appeared and we’ve been complaining since then.
I suggest you consider why you’re only accepting ASCII on a blog that’s published as UTF-8, as it just confuses everything.
Designing for your least able user 7:00pm on 19 Mar 2009 I don’t feel preaching is overly harsh, though I am sorry if it has offended - we are talking about best practices and yet accepting some wiggle room for ease of use.

Note that I can not see that the presentation contains the same material included in the post.

Flash is still at the mercy of one development house, and we can not expect that in many many years we’ll have access to flash consumers - right now most pages on the BBC have been overcome by this timebomb.

S5 is perfectly acceptable, as its viewable with and without javascript (this point also includes your HTML transcript) - and the best thing, nearly all web-enabled devices can view s5 presentations. My mobile (opera mini @ p910i), an iphone(! w/o flash), a G1, a PS3, Firefox, lynx, a psp, need I go on? :)
For offline viewing, PDF or ODF are equally acceptable.

I would like an open web that everyone can view, share, reuse, learn, etc and the really funny thing is its not that far away!

Of course its wrong of me to attack you when the majority of BBC bloggers are unaware of the problems it can bring - I confess its from being brought up from a young age with the beeb and expecting the world from them.
Would you mind passing my comments on to the general BBC IA?
Designing for your least able user 2:38pm on 18 Mar 2009 You’re preaching about designing for your least able user, by uploading a presentation to a Flash-only Web-site.

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