One of my bugbears is the widespread failure of website creators to construct their code (well, technically markup) properly. Back in 2005, Creative Review awarded me ‘Star Letter‘ for my critique of the pretty but entirely inaccessible websites that were being held up as the pinnacle of design. “The web is a medium in itself, not a metaphor for print.”
In particular, I am continually dismayed by sites that present long screeds of text without anchor links that allow linking to a specific part of the text. I wrote a WordPress plugin that adds these invisible bookmarks to the underlying markup.
That’s all very well for my site, but what about other sites? You cannot edit someone else’s content to add the links you want. Continue reading “Cite Bite – Filling the online citation gap”
Why I wrote my WordPress plugin
Strike one item off the bucket list: I’ve written a WordPress plugin.
Paragraph Level IDs is available now from the WordPress plugin directory, and I’ve created a static page on this site to explain the detail. But in essence, the plugin adds lots of little anchors into the HTML of your blog posts, before each paragraph.
This means that the author and users can link to specific paragraphs in a piece of online text.
This functionality is extremely useful when dealing with long screeds of text. Someone may quote a bon mot, but if you follow the link to where the writer says the quote came from, you often have to trawl through many paragraphs to find the quote and check the context. If a site has anchors, or id attributes embedded in the HTML, the person creating the link can send the reader to the exact paragraph in the text.
This is a very old technique, one that has been present in HTML since its earliest incarnations. But few people use it routinely on their webpages. This plugin offers an easy way to alleviate that inefficiency! Continue reading “Why I wrote my WordPress plugin”
The mess under the bonnet of the Houses of Parliament website
Excuse me if I go off on a technical rant for a moment. I find it very irritating when people don’t use HTML mark-up properly. I can forgive the occasional user, or those relying on WYSIWYG editors, but for large, professionally coded websites, there is no excuse for mark-up which does not apply standards correctly.
What has vexed me so? The Houses of Parliament website. In many ways this is a great resource. They offer video of parliamentary debates, and the Hansard of the previous day’s proceedings is posted promptly the following moring. However, the underlying mark-up is flawed. Continue reading “The mess under the bonnet of the Houses of Parliament website”