[ILUG] Worst Irish website competition

[Chris Higgins]

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 19:17:28 +0000
Aidan Delaney <adelaney at cs.may.ie> wrote:

> Hey all,
> 	I was wondering if it would be fun to compile a list of "worst
> 	Irish
> website" from a GNU/Linux point of view.  There would be four
> categories * Government - waste of our money category,
> * Private companies - waste of their money category,
> * General - waste of time category,
> * Special worst tech website category.
> 
> The Government category would include all the county councils, RTE,
> Gardai, universities etc...
> 
> The Private category would include all websites owned by Irish
> companies, not limited to the .ie domain.
> 
> The General category includes Irish sites not in the previous two
> categories.
> 
> The Special category includes Irish tech companies, tech institutions
> (such as linux.ie) etc...
> 
> What the sites would be marked on:
> * Firefox and Konqueror compatability: 

Shouldn't this be secondary to 'standards compliant' ( for whatever doctype standard
the site claims to support ) and then if a site is not standards compliant - how broken
is it ( IE4 specific HTML mixed with Netscape 4 specific html on same page )

> * links/lynx compat: It'd be nice if the site was usable through the
> venerable text browsers.

There is a general web accessibility initiative ( http://www.w3.org/WAI/ ) as well
as projects such as bobby ( http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp )
which may be better than just links/lynx

> * Documents: A website distributing documents in closed formats lose.
> Closed formats are MS Word, Powerpoint, Corel WordPerfect etc...  open
> formats are PDF, RTF, OASIS OpenDocument.

Yippee ( also include response from site webmaster on requests for non .doc formats,
as I've found a couple of .doc only sites that will .pdf docs if I ask - so I ask.. .and ask :-)

> * Media: A website containing multimedia in a closed format lose.
> Closed media formats are WMA, Flash, Quicktime, RealAudio/Video etc...
> open formats are OGG Vorbis and Theora.  Mp3 is a half mark.
> 
> Some people may argue that the documents and media classifications are
> incorrect as we can open MS Word and RealAudio/Flash on GNU/Linux.  My
> answer is that we don't have the MS Word spec, so it's not fully
> compatible.  In the case of RealAudio/Flash, one can download players
> for these formats on ia32 and amd64, but not on the other 14 or so
> platforms supported by the Linux kernel...thus they don't work under
> Linux just on Linux/ia32.
> 
> It's just a bit of fun in no way promoted by the ILUG
> mafia^H^H^H^H^Hcouncil of elders.  So at last...a thread to flame
> people who probably aren't listening...
> 
> Oh yeah, award the website a mark from 0 to 10.  10 for perfectly
> compatible (we shouldn't see any of these marks) and 0 for abysmal.

Make it a 'webshite' award ? ( pardon the language )
All we need is a picture of a steaming pile of fresh agricultural manure
as the logo. The winner get's a plastic bag containing.....
> 
> -- 
> Aidan Delaney   email: adelaney at cs.nuim.ie
>                 web: http://www.cs.nuim.ie/~adelaney
>                 gpg: http://www.cs.nuim.ie/~adelaney/public_key.asc
> 
> 
> -- 
> Irish Linux Users' Group
> http://www.linux.ie/mailman/listinfo/ilug/
> 


-- 
Chris Higgins                              
Darach Technology Ltd                      tel: +353-1-6204370
email: chris.higgins at darach.ie          fax: +353-1-6204371
http://www.darach.ie