Bad Web 2.0 - Helsinki cycling journey planner
Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Kari to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Kari’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most is raising the right issues on underlying market trends as well as purely technical considerations. Kari, the floor is yours…
I’m happy to present you a case of “Web 2.0 gone wrong” á la the wonderful articles at Worse than Failure (aka the Daily WTF).
The Helsinki City Transport together with other nearby cities have for a while ran a successful journey planner on net, which I use quite often. It’s pretty nice service, even though it looks like the they’ve somehow found UI designers from 1992. But no matter, the usability is there and the information is easy to get. It’s the experience that counts, right?
Anyway, they have come up with new service, that I was even more interested in, journey planner for cycling in the Helsinki-Espoo-Vantaa metropolitan zone. This time the UI designers together with Web programmers have really outdone themselves. The site, launched this month in the year 2007, does not work in Safari.
The reason why it doesn’t work in Safari? Take a look at the source of the front page and the reason will become painfully clear. Do you recognize the Ajax framework they’ve used? Yes, instead of using established, cross-platform Ajax frameworks which are freely available on the net (some which I mentioned briefly here ), these guys have opted for rolling their own. People familiar with web technologies probably vomited a bit in their mouth while browsing the source. Surely there is a reason to embed all that JavaScript and CSS in the HTML document. Sorry, did I say HTML? The site is for some reason that completely escapes me authored as XHTML Strict (Okay, I’m nitpicking, but guess does it validate?). There are so many things wrong in trying to publish something on the internet as XHTML Strict and serving it as text/html that it warrants it’s own article.
What is worse, if you browse to the site with Safari, you don’t get any indication that something is wrong (other than that the page is rather blank). You have to go Instructions to find that this shiny new thing uses “Ajax technology”.
As a side note, the site doesn’t work with mobiles either. I consider that the probability that any update to any “recent” browser (as they say on their website) will result in breaking this site is pretty high. Remember, if they got it to run on Safari, it would automatically mean that it would run on the newest Nokia handsets, which feature WebKit-based web browser.
One of the reasons why I’m not impressed with this service like I was with the original journey planner back when it was launched is Google Maps. Take a moment to compare the imagery of Helsinki metropolitan area in the cycling planner and in Google Maps. Both images are at both services’ maximum resolution. See how the building construction of the largest construction project in the city center for years hasn’t even started in the upper right image. This is another nice feature of cycling planner, the satellite maps YTV uses are from 2002. According to them, “unfortunately there is no newer [satellite imagery] available”. Suffice to say, between 2002 and 2007, there have been “some” changes in Helsinki city landscape. Somehow Google Maps is able to offer more recent, more detailed, high-resolution imagery than the cities themselves are able to. There is no excuse for this.
I can’t for the life of me understand why did these guys decide that’s it’s perfectly okay to reinvent an inferior wheel in 2007. Seriously, where have these guys been for the past ten years? This site is one of the worst examples of what makes internet hurt these days. It’s like someone wrote the best practices of web applications and these guys made sure to break each and every one of them.
The Helsinki City Transport and YTV should be congratulated for their efforts, as the initiatives are quite nice. It’s the realization that has totally sucked and this crap shouldn’t come as a surprise after all the recent failures (the new trams they bought don’t work in their environment, the usability of the near-contact travel pass is close to zero and the whole system is full of mistakes, I probably won’t see extensions to our metro system even though I wasn’t even born when they started the planning). Of course I’d like to point out that this isn’t just Helsinki City Transport, but I see this tendency elsewhere too. I don’t even dare to mention the swamp that is the Finnish Digital TV. It looks like public sector and state-run organizations have fallen of the track regards to technology.
If you take a look at the footer, you can see all the governmental and EU organizations that have supported this project. What I’m really worried about is that they’re going to “upgrade” the other route planner with this revolutionizing UI. There’s no indication on the website that they are working on making the planner compatible with the internet of 2007. The web app they now is flawed and I don’t see that they can make it work (be compatible) without a major rewrite, something they are not most likely going to do.
I’m not even going to start how what they’re trying to accomplish could be done by combining their route information with Google Maps. That probably would just fry the brains of the cavemen they found and unfroze to use as their web development team.
What I think I should emphasize is that I believe we made a mistake in the dotcom-boom with coining the term “new media”. While I know that on infrastructure side there are lots of amazing stuff going on also in the public sector, it looks like the marketing people and that sort of people we left working on the “interweb” side of things are causing the situation we are now in.
The role of internet is totally different than what it was in 1999. Back then it was all HTML and web sites, now we’re talking about web applications, where the only connection point is that we use HTML to present stuff. It’s the stuff on the backend that’s improved a lot.
This is evident for example in the company I’m currently working on as our website’s future is in the hands of “New Media Steering Group” and their newest project is called something like “Next Generation Internet” (come on, we’re talking about reworking our web site here!).
We’ve left the web infrastructure to communication and marketing people. The future of WWW is in hands of people who do not have the knowledge or the skills to manage the complexity of today’s web.
Comment by Kari Silvennoinen — May 18, 2007 @ 9:37 am
Kari, am I dreaming or are you commenting your own blog posts???
Comment by Jeremy Fain — May 18, 2007 @ 11:48 am
Interesting points made here, Kari. Had we stuck to HTML, then the web would have surely improved in comparison with 1999. But new standards keep cleaning the sheet.
Comment by Steve — May 18, 2007 @ 12:41 pm
Jeremy, as usual I realized what I was after in my post moments after I had published it, but then I thought that my comment above is a bit off topic of my original post so I thought it would work better as a comment.
Steve, the problem isn’t new technologies. The problem is that people widely use them wrong. This is the reason IE can never be “standards compliant” as it would severly break many “web applications” and sites that depend on IE’s rendering quirks. For example, serving XHTML with content type text/html is wrong according to specs and everything, but it is so widespread that unless the major browsers weren’t loose on these rules, many pages on the net would be unusable (f.e. as mentioned in the webkit.org’s blog I linked to, if the pages were served as xhtml documents they try to be, they wouldn’t work in IE)
The problem isn’t new standards, if the site I mention in the post was coded according to standards, it would work in Safari and in any respectable mobile browser.
The challenges Microsoft faces with IE8: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/01/internet_explorer_standards/
Comment by Kari Silvennoinen — May 18, 2007 @ 1:16 pm
Kari, just a few questions & remarks:
- what’s wrong with designer from 1992? Just kiddding.
- Okay, Google Maps is a good service; but if you’re after beauty, check Virtual Earth out. It simply rocks!
- Kari, maybe devising user-friendly web apps fits agile organizations better than state-ran monsters. Doesn’t it?
- What do you think of Silverlight, frankly?
- And Apollo?
- I wish you had published a printed screen of the source code and commented it. Could you maybe do this in an addendum?
Thanks in advance and sorry for all these (stupid?) questions and remarks.
Comment by Jeremy Fain — May 19, 2007 @ 1:49 am
Jeremy, really good questions! I think I could answer better if i wrote a post about them, but anyway.
What I mean with “design from 1992″ is the table-based layout and overall look of the site.
I’ve not used that much Virtual Earth, as I’m on a Mac. I’ve seen screenshots and it looks quite nice. I’m not that much into beauty as I’m into usability and in that sense, what I like about Google Maps is its new My Maps section. You remember when I was trying to illustrate you the IT startups in Helsinki on a map? Now I can finally do it in Google Maps.
I’m a bit skeptic about Apollo and Silverlight. I tried to install Silverlight, but, guess what, I can’t install it! The download from Microsoft is broken and the .DMG doesn’t mount! Not a good way to drive adoption, which is critical for both of them. Flash wasn’t installed into 99,999% of browsers in a day, it took years.
Well, there’s not much to comment about the 124 KB , 2788 line page, of which 2762 lines is JavaScript and 24 KB (it’s all on one line) CSS, leaving 8 KB or 25 lines of HTML! Then there’s the cool comment-obfuscation of the CSS and JS, which I can’t reproduce here or my comment will break. Pretty much everything in the CSS is class-selector. There’s like a zillion DIV-tags in the HTML, but that’s endemic these days. Someone else can comment on the JavaScript. My absolute favourite is the meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ tag.
Comment by Kari Silvennoinen — May 19, 2007 @ 11:08 am
Jeremy, here’s the most high-res satellite imagery from Live Maps… http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v214/dazyx/highres.jpg =)
Comment by kari — May 19, 2007 @ 11:52 am
Thx man. About the IT start ups in Helsinki, did you manage to gather some background content to let us know some day about the tech innovation ecosystem in your city?
Comment by Jeremy Fain — May 19, 2007 @ 4:14 pm
Interesting post, but I have to disagree with some of your points. Your post basically argues that if a web page does not validate, it’s crap. Unfortunately things are not that simple in the real world.
As your screenshot on Flickr says, that page has one validation error. Google maps? 138 errors. This page? 23 errors. You spend one paragraph in your post arguing for the importance of web standards and validation, and another praising the implementation of Google Maps. I don’t disagree with the latter point - Google Maps is a very nice service, but it seems that you have one standard for Google and another for rest of the web.
It could be that they changed the web page after your original post, but at least for my client (and for WebSniffer) the site has Content-type: application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8. It also works on Opera 9.10 and the browser installed on Nokia N95 (I guess that qualifies for a recent Nokia phone?).
Perhaps you were using a different journey planner than me, or your browser just had a bad day.
Comment by Antti Tuomi — June 4, 2007 @ 6:41 pm
Ah, almost forgot this: Check the Content-type and doctype at maps.google.com.
Spoiler: It’s Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 and doctype XHTML 1.0 Strict.
Comment by Antti Tuomi — June 4, 2007 @ 6:49 pm
Antti,
Thanks for your comments, you’re right. They have updated the Cycling Journey planner as you can read from their Instructions-page, “Safari browser for Mac is now supported”. And you know what, this is great! It seems there were others who also thought that Safari support is essential to any website today.
As I said in the article, while I’m an advocate for web standards, I was nitpicking about validation. At no point did I claim that Google Maps validated, I pointed it out to compare the satellite imagery. I’m sorry if you understood that my post was about web page validations equalling goodness. This was not my intention, the point I was trying to make is that excluding browsers is inexcusable now when IE is not the majority anymore and even the “minor” browsers have enough market share to be important. You must agree that the best way to achieve cross-browser compatibility is through established web standards or at least should be?
It seems they do some kind of sniffing and change the http-equiv content-type depending on the browser. For Firefox 2 and Opera 9 it is application/xhtml+xml, for Safari text/html.
Comment by Kari Silvennoinen — June 4, 2007 @ 8:37 pm