BHIT: Web Idiots

Ian G Batten said:

Of course, were I a bad person, I'd suggest that as a government funded
body their website should comply with the Disability Discrimination Act,
and it's 99.9% certain that a site which demands Flash in order to see
its front page isn't compliant. But making that complaint would be
childish, wouldn't it?

BHIT would probably claim that they wouldn't have been disabled if
they'd worn a helmet ;-)

Ian G Batten said:

So, linking from Guy's pages, I decided to go and have a chortle.

First attempt: ``You don't appear to have the Shockwave plug-in.'' OK,
I've only got the Shockwave 5.0 plugin installed, because Shockwave is
the work of the devil, so I followed the links and installed the latest
bits. Shutdown the browser [*], restart, and lo, Help->About Plugins shows
I'm now running Shockwave 6.0 r81, which is the latest and greatest.
Visit BHIT again. It _still_ says I'm not running Shockwave, and offers
me precisely the release I'm running.

Clearly, BHIT care more about pushing Shockwave than pushing their
ideas, so sadly I'll be unable to read their pearls of wisdom. It's
sad, isn't it?

Of course, were I a bad person, I'd suggest that as a government funded
body their website should comply with the Disability Discrimination Act,
and it's 99.9% certain that a site which demands Flash in order to see
its front page isn't compliant. But making that complaint would be
childish, wouldn't it?

But people with disabilities would be using God's Gift to operating
systems and Browsers, supporting our Great Leader from the other side
of the Atlantic and hist Evil Henchman William Gates, wouldn't they?

Then, the browser or whatever ID string returned to the site would
have identified you as a Good Guy (not to be confused with Just zis Guy),
and not one of the satanic alternative OS brigade.

Quoted message said:

ian

[*] Mozilla 1.6 on Solaris 10 build 55. I could put on Mozilla 1.7, or
indeed Solaris 10 build 58. I doubt it'll help.

Quite.

--
Trevor Barton

Ian G Batten said:

So, linking from Guy's pages, I decided to go and have a chortle.

First attempt: ``You don't appear to have the Shockwave plug-in.'' OK,
I've only got the Shockwave 5.0 plugin installed, because Shockwave is
the work of the devil, so I followed the links and installed the latest
bits. Shutdown the browser [*], restart, and lo, Help->About Plugins shows
I'm now running Shockwave 6.0 r81, which is the latest and greatest.
Visit BHIT again. It _still_ says I'm not running Shockwave, and offers
me precisely the release I'm running.

Same here, Mozilla on Linux. But it is correct, we don't have Shockwave,
we have Shockwave Flash plugins. Shockwave is only available for Windows
and Mac. Great innit?

Quoted message said:

Clearly, BHIT care more about pushing Shockwave than pushing their
ideas, so sadly I'll be unable to read their pearls of wisdom. It's
sad, isn't it?

Very. I was looking for a laugh, instead I got annoying website
stupidity before it even starts.

Quoted message said:

Of course, were I a bad person, I'd suggest that as a government funded
body their website should comply with the Disability Discrimination Act,
and it's 99.9% certain that a site which demands Flash in order to see
its front page isn't compliant. But making that complaint would be
childish, wouldn't it?

Not in the slightest. Never mind government funding, anyone who makes a
site/frontpage like this needs a healthy dose of [censored] kicking.

Frink

--
Doctor J. Frink : 'Rampant Ribald Ringtail'
See his mind here : http://www.cmp.liv.ac.uk/frink/
Annoy his mind here : pjf at cmp dot liv dot ack dot ook
"No sir, I didn't like it!" - Mr Horse

in message <[email hidden]>, Ian G Batten

(') said:

So, linking from Guy's pages, I decided to go and have a chortle.

First attempt: ``You don't appear to have the Shockwave plug-in.''
OK, I've only got the Shockwave 5.0 plugin installed, because
Shockwave is the work of the devil, so I followed the links and
installed the latest
bits. Shutdown the browser [*], restart, and lo, Help->About Plugins
shows I'm now running Shockwave 6.0 r81, which is the latest and
greatest.
Visit BHIT again. It _still_ says I'm not running Shockwave, and
offers me precisely the release I'm running.

Don't start.

The level of competence of the web 'design' industry is enough to make
any sensible person weep. Not one commercial website in twenty conforms
either to the published standards or with the law on disability access,
and in general it seems the more money is spent the worse the outcome.

The is not something which is unique to dubious political lobbying
campaigns.

--
[email hidden] (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

;; single speed mountain bikes: for people who cycle on flat mountains.

(Doctor J. Frink) said:

On Mon, 28 Jun 2004 16:31:00 +0000 (UTC), Ian G Batten
<[email hidden]> wrote:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

So, linking from Guy's pages, I decided to go and have a chortle.

First attempt: ``You don't appear to have the Shockwave plug-in.'' OK,
I've only got the Shockwave 5.0 plugin installed, because Shockwave is
the work of the devil, so I followed the links and installed the latest
bits. Shutdown the browser [*], restart, and lo, Help->About Plugins shows
I'm now running Shockwave 6.0 r81, which is the latest and greatest.
Visit BHIT again. It _still_ says I'm not running Shockwave, and offers
me precisely the release I'm running.

Quoted message said:

Same here, Mozilla on Linux. But it is correct, we don't have Shockwave,
we have Shockwave Flash plugins. Shockwave is only available for Windows
and Mac. Great innit?

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Clearly, BHIT care more about pushing Shockwave than pushing their
ideas, so sadly I'll be unable to read their pearls of wisdom. It's
sad, isn't it?

Quoted message said:

Very. I was looking for a laugh, instead I got annoying website
stupidity before it even starts.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Of course, were I a bad person, I'd suggest that as a government funded
body their website should comply with the Disability Discrimination Act,
and it's 99.9% certain that a site which demands Flash in order to see
its front page isn't compliant. But making that complaint would be
childish, wouldn't it?

Quoted message said:

Not in the slightest. Never mind government funding, anyone who makes a
site/frontpage like this needs a healthy dose of [censored] kicking.

I wasn't looking forward to the day when I would have enough free time
to fulfil my public obligation to have a look at what my tax payer's
money has bought me on the BeHIT web pages. I'm very pleased to
discover that they're so stupid they've made their pages unreadable by
me. In all likelihood, like most of the folk who do that kind of
thing, they'll even be too stupid to ever understand how stupid it is
to make a web site like that, so I'll never be able to read it.

How nice to start the day by crossing off a nasty chore I no longer
have to do!
--
Chris Malcolm [email hidden] +44 (0)131 651 3445 DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]

Simon Brooke said:

Don't start.

The level of competence of the web 'design' industry is enough to make
any sensible person weep. Not one commercial website in twenty conforms
either to the published standards or with the law on disability access,
and in general it seems the more money is spent the worse the outcome.

Oops, I'm starting.

This is not helped by the belief that "With Microsoft anyone can do it
without any training, cause its so user friendly. Even the secretary can
administer a web site, as surely if you know Word you can do anything -
lower TCO, user friendly operating system, perhaps we can use Nissan
Micras to carry our 40 tonne loads up the M1 by the same logic, after
all they scale outwards just like NT and you don't need expensive HGV
qualified drivers, wibble wibble...".

Too many developers are just used to point and drool in VB without
any understanding of whats going on. You can't just let these people
onto active web sites - as many of them have never heard of things
like Cross Site Scripting and SQL Injection. "My site goes wrong when
someone enters a single quote into a text field - I wonder why". We're
talking the kind of people who'd email back your credit card details in
plain text as a receipt, and the people that employ them don't know that
there's anything wrong with this.

Fortunately things seem to be getting better. There's so much security
news in the news that I think people are starting to take notice, and
Microsoft's newer development environments make it easier to avoid cross
site scripting and SQL Injection by providing the tools to avoid them
and making them more the natural choice to use, so the Point and Drool
crowd are steadily being dragged into the century of the fruitbat.

I wonder if MS's poor site security and reliability statistics are more
to do with the attitude that anyone, even without training or knowledge,
can run a web site using their tools than due to underlying faults in
the tools themselves. People using Linux based tools tend to know what
they're doing, for now, and big shops using J2EE tend to have training
plans and the infrastructure in place to make sure someone there knows
whats going on.

- Richard

--
_/_/_/ _/_/_/ _/_/_/ Richard dot Corfield at ntlworld dot com
_/ _/ _/ _/
_/_/ _/ _/ Time is a one way street,
_/ _/ _/_/ _/_/_/ Except in the Twilight Zone.

Quoted message said:

How nice to start the day by crossing off a nasty chore I no longer
have to do!

Sorry for this, but here's a link to the main page that should bypass the
sillyness[1]

<url:http://www.bhit.org/index-home.html>

Mark.

[1] You're missing out on an animation of a bike riding across the
screen, and the following:

"You may be aware that a Private Member’s Bill is currently passing
through Parliament. The enactment of the Bill will make the wearing of
helmets mandatory for all children riding bicycles. We entirely endorse
and support this Bill as it helps ensure the safety and well being of
children.

It has come to our attention that we are being quoted out of context on a
number of websites attempting to demonstrate their opposition to helmet
wearing.

The following links will direct you to websites, which detail the
efficacy of helmets from independent organisations. All the research is
peer vetted and none based on opinion from an individual or group."

[then links to sites including BHSI]

On 29/6/04 12:35 am, in article
[email hidden], "Simon Brooke"

Quoted message said:

Don't start.

The level of competence of the web 'design' industry is enough to make
any sensible person weep. Not one commercial website in twenty conforms
either to the published standards or with the law on disability access,
and in general it seems the more money is spent the worse the outcome.

The is not something which is unique to dubious political lobbying
campaigns.

We are currently getting bids from several design companies to redo the
institute website. My impression is that the good people are actually very
good. But there are a lot of cowboys out there.

Lots of fun with interrogating them on DDA, graceful degradation, standards
compliance etc.

...d

Ian G Batten <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

So, linking from Guy's pages, I decided to go and have a chortle.

I was inspired by your example and so I guessed the address to go and
have a look. What *could* a certain Urban Cyclist-UK correspondent
*possibly* want with the domain name bhit.org.uk? Most strange?

www.bhit.org.uk/index2.html gives you pretty much the same browser
experience in Moz as IE/Flash.

I notice that they are still displaying the Nationwide logo. I
thought they had pulled their suppport.

fwiw these guys designed it (and are proud enough of their work to
want a logo on the site) http://www.imagebox.co.uk/

If you ever want a quote from the site to use as a tagline for a link
then this rather sums up their pov

http://www.bhit.org/mad.html
"MAD riders never cycle without their helmets"

best wishes
james

On 29 Jun 2004 08:39:57 GMT, Mark Thompson
<[email hidden]> wrote in message
<[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

[then links to sites including BHSI]

Which is of course the opinions of one individual, with no
peer-vetting :-)

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington University

On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 09:59:34 +0100, David Martin
<[email hidden]> wrote in message
<[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

We are currently getting bids from several design companies to redo the
institute website. My impression is that the good people are actually very
good. But there are a lot of cowboys out there.
Lots of fun with interrogating them on DDA, graceful degradation, standards
compliance etc.

We got the Third Degree on that from B&Q when we did their recruitment
site. But we had expected it, so we knew more about it than they did
and ended up showing them things they didn't know :-)

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington University

Ian G Batten said:

So, linking from Guy's pages, I decided to go and have a chortle.

First attempt: ``You don't appear to have the Shockwave plug-in.'' OK,
I've only got the Shockwave 5.0 plugin installed, because Shockwave is
the work of the devil, so I followed the links and installed the latest
bits. Shutdown the browser [*], restart, and lo, Help->About Plugins shows
I'm now running Shockwave 6.0 r81, which is the latest and greatest.
Visit BHIT again. It _still_ says I'm not running Shockwave, and offers
me precisely the release I'm running.

Clearly, BHIT care more about pushing Shockwave than pushing their
ideas, so sadly I'll be unable to read their pearls of wisdom. It's
sad, isn't it?

Of course, were I a bad person, I'd suggest that as a government funded
body their website should comply with the Disability Discrimination Act,
and it's 99.9% certain that a site which demands Flash in order to see
its front page isn't compliant. But making that complaint would be
childish, wouldn't it?

ian

[*] Mozilla 1.6 on Solaris 10 build 55. I could put on Mozilla 1.7, or
indeed Solaris 10 build 58. I doubt it'll help.

Me too! I'll never know what I'm missing. Did you also notice that the
html for even this page is invalid... no doctype! I hope they didn't pay
for this.

Steve

Ian G Batten <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

So, linking from Guy's pages, I decided to go and have a chortle.

First attempt: ``You don't appear to have the Shockwave plug-in.'' OK,
I've only got the Shockwave 5.0 plugin installed, because Shockwave is
the work of the devil, so I followed the links and installed the latest
bits. Shutdown the browser [*], restart, and lo, Help->About Plugins shows
I'm now running Shockwave 6.0 r81, which is the latest and greatest.
Visit BHIT again. It _still_ says I'm not running Shockwave, and offers
me precisely the release I'm running.

You can bypass the rubbish at the beginning and go straight to the
rubbish inside by going to <http://www.bhit.org/index-home.html>.

Click on "What We Do & Why" then on "Why Helmets" and you will see
they are /still/ making the claim:

"Properly worn bicycle helmets have been shown to reduce the risk of
head injury by 85% and the risk of brain injury by almost 90%, and are
effective in all forms of crashes including those involving a motor
vehicle."

So there we are. Helmets are even more effective at preventing brain
injury than they are at preventing all forms of head injury including.

Nasty site altogether.

--
Dave...

On 29 Jun 2004 02:52:00 -0700, [email hidden] (Dave Kahn) wrote
in message <[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

"Properly worn bicycle helmets have been shown to reduce the risk of
head injury by 85% and the risk of brain injury by almost 90%, and are
effective in all forms of crashes including those involving a motor
vehicle."

If anyone can find a leaflet with that printed on, it would be covered
by the code of advertising practice.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at Washington University

Steve said:

Me too! I'll never know what I'm missing. Did you also notice that the
html for even this page is invalid... no doctype! I hope they didn't pay
for this.

Same goes for the company that produced the site:

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A//www.imagebox.co.uk/home.html

--
jc

Remove the -not from email

james said:

http://www.bhit.org/mad.html
"MAD riders never cycle without their helmets"

Why use a standard scrollbar that any browser can understand and provide
nice shortcuts for when you can write your own in Javascript?

- Richard

--
_/_/_/ _/_/_/ _/_/_/ Richard dot Corfield at ntlworld dot com
_/ _/ _/ _/
_/_/ _/ _/ Time is a one way street,
_/ _/ _/_/ _/_/_/ Except in the Twilight Zone.

In article <[email hidden]>,

Richard Corfield said:

Why use a standard scrollbar that any browser can understand and provide
nice shortcuts for when you can write your own in Javascript?

Because you're being paid by the hour?

ian

Jeremy Collins said:

Steve said:

Me too! I'll never know what I'm missing. Did you also notice that
the html for even this page is invalid... no doctype! I hope they
didn't pay for this.

Same goes for the company that produced the site:

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A//www.imagebox.co.uk/home.html

If you want a real laugh, stick the BBC homepage through w3 parser:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk

in message <[email hidden]>, Ian G Batten

(') said:

In article
<[email hidden]>,

Richard Corfield said:

Why use a standard scrollbar that any browser can understand and
provide nice shortcuts for when you can write your own in Javascript?

Because you're being paid by the hour?

I think, to be honest, its more about willie-waving than billing.
Peurile adolescent 'look how clever I am' showing off. It's not just
the small agencies who are guilty of this sort of thing. Take a stroll
round some of Britain's largest and most expensive corporate web sites
and you'll see it everywhere.

--
[email hidden] (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

;; Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.