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The Future?

We spoke a couple of months ago about Sky's Digital TV system and it's proposed Internet links. Many big names are currently spending large sums of money to give us all free or low-cost Internet access. Isn't that nice of them? Why? Because they can see the Internet as a huge area of growth that demands their attention. But like all companies they will need to make money from this technology. Companies who offer Internet connectivity can easily gather data as to what their users are looking at. The Dixons free service for example by default connects users through a proxy server. This can speed up Internet access but also does provide statistics of what is being looked at on the Internet. This gathering of information is not necessarily for some sinister 'big brother' reason, but for building a profile of these users to sell to the advertisers.

However, there is a dark side of this revolution that is already rearing its head with some of the cable companies. The provider, be they cable, satellite, or terrestrial can select which web sites would be available through their system. Fine for some of the more dubious sites to be excluded from granny watching TV in the sitting room, but who decides? The reason being given at the moment for this restriction of coverage is one of bandwidth. This seems to us a very strange excuse. A form of censorship of sites, where perhaps a pin number has to be entered to access 'adult' sites would, we're sure, be welcomed by the majority and go a long way to reducing parent's reservations about allowing their children to have Internet access, (that and the fear of large 'phone bills!). So long as the entire web was available once this pin number was entered.

However, if this censorship were allowed to go unchecked then the content of the web that most people would experience could be at the control of the large corporations. This censorship could take the form of where news feeds or articles would be blocked, this would be a serious retrograde step, as currently the Internet offers us a source of information free from any censorship. Obviously access to this mass of information, correct or otherwise, brings it's own problems, but control of Internet content for a major group of users by any one company can not be a good idea. We shall have to wait and see how Interactive Digital TV pans out when it launches. But it will certainly provide the long awaited mechanism for a large number of people to access the web, and with that should come a variety of on-line services.

The whole structure of many companies could change as on-line transactions move from the domain of the educational user, computer enthusiast or business user into a large section of the mass market. Digital TV is already delivering on its promises of better picture, sound, and more channels, we will wait to see if it manages to deliver on the promises made for Interactive Digital TV. Already companies like Apple have developed design environments like WebObjects 4 which, curiously at the moment, only runs under NT, which will enable developers to deliver web sites and digital TV content from a common development environment. This is going to be an area that anyone who sells or provides such services needs to watch very closely. It may be a very big slow moving boat but it's still possible to miss it.

Idiotic Front Page (again!)

OK, OK, we know that we are always moaning about Front Page 98 and it does get tedious, but we came across this amazing bit of stupidity the otherday. We are all familiar that when browsing on the web links are coloured and after you have clicked on them they change colour. We were designing a site the other day and noticed that the links were not changing colours, this was happening in IE4, IE5, NS3 and NS 4. When we looked at the HTML for the link:

Company Overview

</a>

Now you see the problem, don't you? The 'href' tag is outside the 'font' tag so the font tag settings are overriding the colour changes that href is trying to implement because of a visited link. If the Code is corrected so it looks like this:

Company Overview

</a>

And all works fine. So now you are asking, 'how do you stop Front Page 98 generating code like that?'. The answer is that you can't, Front page should not allow code like this, the reason for it generating one version in preference seems to depend on the order links and colours are applied. This is one of the most frustrating and stupid bugs we have found in Front Page so far. It means that EVERY link that does not use a graphic needs to be checked and if necessary changed by looking at and editing the raw HTML code. This is not a job that the average Front Page user wants to do and neither should they.