Okay, so the Google Toolbar (I don't have it but I know of its ways) highlights text fields on forms such as "name", "email", etc. to tell you it can fill those in automatically for you. I'm sure the Yahoo! Toolbar does that too, but that's not the point.

On a regular page, for me, form fields appear white (or whatever colour they're supposed to be), but for some people they'll turn yellow. Sometimes clients (who possibly unknowingly have the toolbar installed or are just too stupid to know what it is) will complain about yellow text fields. So we have to put in code to force it back to white.

There are about a zillion problems with this (okay maybe only the two) but I'll just list two:

1) People who have custom styles/themes on their browser/OSes (e.g. if I have a dark theme on Windows text fields will most probably be black or dark grey by default) will be forced to white, making them look stupid ugly and out of context. And it happens for everyone, not just Google Toolbar people.

2) If people don't want yellow text fields they can turn the autofill feature off. If clients don't want them they can turn it off, and if regular people don't want it so can they. In fact for people who use autofill, the feature is now seemingly disabled. "Hey! Why can't the Google Toolbar fill in this form for me?" Okay so it still can, but it's not alerting them that it can, so they might think it can't. Great work, stupid clients! Most people with autofill turned on will actually want the feature, so why are you effectively disabling it for them?

So who does this benefit? Yup, no-one. Well it benefits the client who obviously have autofill turned on and don't know what it is or how to use it. If they knew it was autofill they surely wouldn't want the yellow to go away, right?

Rant over for today...

I probably shouldn't blog about this at work, so I'm doing it here, even though no-one cares.

But yes, I hate SEO (search engine optimisation). The idea is to have pages full of keywords, and tune your page's title, description, etc. for good keyword searches. And various other things.

Don't get me wrong. I like SEO in its true form - making a site that is easily readable by search engine robots (and blind people's screen readers, etc.) - but the whole thing of putting keywords where descriptive text should be (images, headings, etc.) is a bit stupid. The point of a website is to make it a nice place to go for your users, not bombarding them with stuff meant for search engines.

The idea that the SEO people have is that more keywords and stuff means higher search rankings and thus more people going to the badly-put-together site. The actual best way to get people to go to your site is to have content that people care about. The more useful your site is, the more people will like it, and thus will link to it more. Links to a site are the biggest things that push a site up the rankings, so give people something to link to!

Of course, that all works in a world where the site you're trying to make is like Wikipedia or other similar things. The problem for me is that at work we mainly sell reasonably small sites to reasonably small businesses. They don't have a lot of content to offer the masses, and a lot of people aren't likely to be linking to a Birmingham-based mobility firm or something. So they need the keywords and stuff to get people in. It's a shame, but that's the way it is. Not everything works like it does in fluffy dreamy land. Unfortunately.

I found out just now that berk is actually a lot coarser than I (and probably many people) thought.

It's from the rhyming slang "Berkshire Hunt" (or "Berkeley Hunt") so there you go. And yes, they'd normally be pronounced "bark-" not "berk-" but hey.

So, here's what usually happens on normal commercial TV stations:

Programme starts, 11ish minutes pass, advert for 4 minutes, programme comes back on, 11 minutes pass, end of programme, adverts for 4 minutes, rinse and repeat.

Here's how ABC (an American channel run by Disney et al.) does it:

Programme starts, 2 minutes pass, adverts for 4 minutes, programme comes back on, 7ish minutes pass, adverts for 4 minutes, programme comes back on, 7ish minutes pass, adverts for 4 minutes, programme comes back on for the last 2 minutes, next programme starts for two minutes, etc.

To put it in the context of a times schedule:


Channel 4, ITV, Sky One, normal channels:

6.00 - Friends Part 1
6.11 - Adverts
6.15 - Friends Part 2
6.26 - Adverts
6.30 - Simpsons
...


ABC, hopefully not all channels in America:

6.00 - Scrubs Intro (possibly ending with the title sequence???)
6.02 - Adverts
6.06 - Scrubs Part 1
6.13 - Adverts
6.17 - Scrubs Part 2
6.24 - Adverts
6.28 - Scrubs Outro (yeah I hate that word - "outroduction"?)
6.30 - Little ABC logo and then bam, straight into 8 Simple Rules (where obviously one turns off the TV)
...


Okay that's not definite, but they definitely have the ending of one programme running into the beginning of the next, with an advert break either side, although they may be smaller than a normal TV advert break. Either way, the point is that it really annoys me. But it's kinda clever: you have to sit though all the adverts in order to watch the whole of your programme. And then you accidentally get hooked on the next programme and have to watch all of those adverts. That's a double whammy for ABC, but a rather annoying experience for me. Still I like Scrubs a lot, and if E4 or Paramount Comedy have got something rubbish on I'm forced to watch ABC. I also have a feeling that maybe all (or at least the majority of) American TV (y'know, over in America) is probably like this. I'd love to go and live in California one day (probably isn't going to happen, but I'd quite like to) but if the TV's that annoying I'm not sure I could. Luckily I don't watch a lot of TV seriously, so the annoyance at the moment is only when I fancy watching something funny while I'm cooking food.

'Baby On Board' Signs

They do nothing for me. Not that I'm a driver, but I once was and that's not even the point. I'm a careful driver, careful drivers are careful drivers, careless drivers are careless drivers. A sign saying "hold on! Slow down, I have a baby in my car!" won't affect the careless drivers. I'm sure they care more about their own lives than that of a baby they don't know, thus if they're willing to put their own (and yes, others') lives at risk then they most certainly won't heed your sign's advice.

In addition to that, and more controversially, I hate it that people put kids' lives ahead of anyone else's. If a child is killed, it's made a huge deal of in the news. If an adult is killed, sure, it's reported, but it's not as big a deal. Why? They're both lives. Okay, the child statistically has more life left (although due to the nature of the argument that's untrue) that's been lost, but I really don't think people are sadder because that's twenty-odd years taken away from the human race as a whole. So yes, I do get it, people are sadder because for some reason it's sadder when a younger person dies, and not because of the lifespan thing. Maybe it's something to do with innocence. Either way it's not very logical, but I guess emotions aren't supposed to be logical.

So to summarise, 'baby on board' signs are stupid, and I've argued myself out of an argument. But it's still silly and illogical.