Year: 2003

There are three types of websites that I can discern: those that attempt to keep users from browsing outside them, those that encourage users to leave them, and those that strike a balance. Of these, the ones I most regularly find useful or interesting, and the ones that I return to, are the ones that point elsewhere.

It’s not coincidental that most of my favourite sites are created by individuals. Most companies have a vested interest in keeping eyes on their products and away from their competitors’; it’s a rare one that will point to another and say they do good work too. Personal sites, on the other hand–especially weblogs–are all about sending readers to other places that have more information or different perspectives, or that the author just finds interesting, at appropriate points.

Hardly a revelation, I know, particularly to anyone who reads this irregular little screed and others like it, but I thought it needed saying. Now go away and find something more interesting.

I’ve updated the code behind the pages to a more modern and flexible system and at the same time amended the design to make pages quicker to load and less fussy in appearance. An additional benefit is that the site is now more accessible to visitors with disabilities.

Michael Quinion, World Wide Words

In other words, WWW is now–almost–a valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional site. (Those darned character entity references in URLs… happens to the best of us.)

Mark Pilgrim and Ian Hickson might not be overjoyed. There’s lots of semantic information in the classes, what appears (to me, at least) to be appropriate use of the meta element, and even Dublin Core metadata; he even uses curly apostrophes. However, there are two things I think Mark and Ian would recommend: respectively, using the cite tag to mark up words and phrases quoted for themselves (particularly instead of <em class="citedform">), and using heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) in place of structures like <p class="heading"> and <p class="sectiontag" style="margin-top:0.5em">.

But you know what? (That’s you as in all y’all, of course.) It’s still a cool site, and I go back again and again. Content is king, and Michael Quinion has some 1250 pages that say he da man.

I was recently demonstrating to someone how easy it is to find information on the web, and then infer certain things about that data–the kind of data mining that anyone can do, given even a basic understanding of search engines. My example, at once effectively and poorly chosen, was the person’s name: effectively because Google Canada returned a single hit, to a page containing a list of people, from which I was able to guess the person’s approximate age, level of education, hometown, and various other bits of information; and poorly because by doing so I think I’ve made this person afraid, of others and of me. Coming up with personal details like that in seconds just to prove a point to someone unfamiliar with the web–let alone the Internet–is more disturbing than I’d considered.

I’m not a privacy zealot by any means. I still fill out forms with accurate demographic information (but bogus e-mail addresses), I use my credit card with abandon, and I’ve only skimmed the EFF‘s website; denying cookies is about as far as I go to conceal my web travels. Seeing the reaction to what I thought of as a trivial little exercise, though, makes me wonder if I’ve been a little too blasé about the whole matter. I’m fine with the information I’ve deliberately released about myself; this weblog may cross the line as to providing material from which certain deductions can be made, but I think I’m willing to stretch that far. It’s the information that I don’t know about–like the Google hit in my demo–that concerns me.

Not that I have anything untoward to hide… I revel in being the most boring person I know!