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Netscape Navigator had the What's Related button in 2001.

Aside from the fact that you're a troll, there's a deeper meme here worth debunking: that accessibility features are just for the "impaired".

Gregg Vanderheiden gave the closing plenary talk at the SIGCHI 2001 conference. The subject was how creative integration of accessibility features can greatly improve functionality for all users, including examples of products originally designed for people with impairments which went on to wider commercial success. As an example of this kind of thinking, with portable devices (mobile phones, music players, PDAs) we're all "blind" at some time or another -- we cannot or do not want to redirect our visual attention to the device. So what happens when the normal function of the device includes cues to operation that don't require vision (via audio, haptics, etc.)? The device becomes more useful to everyone, including those with visual impairment. Likewise, by including design elements that work when users can't hear a device that device is more useful to both the hearing impaired and to users in loud environments.

There's a summary of this presentation with more details here: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/chi/ Scroll down past the stuff about Bill Gates' opening keynote (which was utterly lame in comparison to Vanderheiden's talk, IMO).

It's already happening; thus all the eprints installations, the RDN and so on. There's a lot of this stuff going on throughout Europe. No scientist particularly enjoys being behind a subscription-only system, so it generally catches on to some extent.

The major problem is a) that it's often hard to find somebody willing to put in the time to populate archives like these, and b) several of the arsier publishers won't agree with the online distribution of preprint papers.

I think the question to ask is not so much how long it will take before the rest of the EU follows suit, since there are parallel efforts going on all over the place, most of which use the same basic technology set (OAI - open archives initiative). There's a paper about DAREnet that remains unslashdotted, here. If anything, the question is "How long will it take each group to get a move on and implement something?" and the answer to that is something between "how long is a piece of string?" and "How much does the group in question enjoy politics?"

This is nothing new, and has been affecting people for many years already.

The BBC, to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday book by creating a new version (and making a program about it).

This project's output was a laser disc that required a BBC micro (ask your grandad) and a special reader to decode... In the spirit of portability, it seems that the original documentation describing all formats used was consigned to /dev/null, and so the ability to view these discs was rapidly diminishing as people got rid of the specialist readers, and the BBC micros...

Thankfully, someone did something about.

The full article is an interesting read, and the warning is there for everyone to see...

Hopefully people will learn from such experiences, but would you bet on it? :-)

Cheers,
Nick.

just ask the BBC about the problems they had with reading data from the disks they used for the Domesday project,... and they had access to the original programmers etc.

many librarians have been very active in the destruction of the historical record they are supposed to be preserving, in their active efforts to badly microfilm, then pulp, historical newspaper collections.

Cites?

Didn't think so.

Well, it's probably more library administrators (some of who are librarians) fighting to deal with inadequate budgets and space, and the demand for (and sexiness of) newer technologies (Internet access, CDs, etc.) that enroach on existing physical space. You want cites?

Do we want to keep our newspapers?
Novelist buys and saves old papers to avert their destruction

• ariadne article with technical info, photographs and screenshots of the new interface
• BBC article
• National archives article
• The register article

interoperability. I agree with Knife_Edge that Apple is encouraging cross-platform interoperability.

• Apple includes a notable Java environment.
• Apple promotes (see the "Use the best tool for the job" heading) Virtual PC.
  
• fink
• Appleworks provides file-format interoperability with common Microsoft Office applications through the use of MacLinkPlus tools.

"Can you explain to me exactly which advanced functionality your bank need to use to make their site work that hasn't been there since HTML 1.0?"

Have you not read the HTML standards? HTML 1.0 didn't support anything but basic hyperlinking and the <PRE> tag. See here for more details. HTML 1.0 didn't support tables, forms, frames, etc. (Warning: Link is extremely dated.)

As I said earlier, I code my pages to the XHTML 1.0 standard. That means that Netscape 4.x won't render them properly, as Netscape 4 relies on a number of non-standard HTML tags and attributes (marginwidth, marginheight, height, etc.) In fact, Netscape 4 is so buggy when it comes to CSS that there are whole pages dedicated to its bugginess. (Search Google for more.)

Moral of the story: Code your pages to standards, and make sure they work in IE 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0. Beyond that, it's up to each individual web developer.

I couldn't agree more on the need for more than one search engine. We all have our own particular favourites, be it football team, car or brand of tea. The same can also be said of search engines, and for many people at the moment it seems to be Google. On the courses that I run I usually ask the question 'what's your favourite search engine?' and the two that are most often mentioned are Google and Yahoo!

At the Online Conference in London recently I attended several talks on search engines and workshops regarding them, and AltaVista was barely mentioned. However, even just a couple of years ago AltaVista was highly regarded as perhaps the best of the free text search engines; it had a large database which was regularly updated, it was also constantly updating and adding new features and its search syntax was very flexible. Yet now it's being seen as an also ran and on at least one newsgroup that I take (alt.internet.search-engines) the majority of web authors say that they hardly pay any attention to it.

I chose to look at AlltheWeb, otherwise known as 'FAST' rather than Google, if for no other reason than many people are already aware of what Google can offer, and I thought it would be more interesting to concentrate on a slightly lesser known search engine, but one which is increasingly being mentioned these days.

AlltheWeb is owned by Fast Search & Transfer ASA (FAST), a Norwegian company. FAST claims that it has over 625,000,000 web pages indexed, which is certainly an acceptable size and is comparable to AltaVista and Northern Light, but still lagging some way behind Google. However, it is making considerable claims for both the freshness of it's data - it claims a rate of between 9-12 days which puts it way out in front of the other major engines - and for its news stories, claiming in a press release "Indexing up to 800 news stories per minute and real-time indexing of news stories from over three thousand online sources" AllTheWeb Upgrade Announcement

The main search page is very clear and uncluttered, consisting of a single screen, which makes a change from the confusing approach taken by AltaVista, while providing more immediate functionality than Google. The user has several immediate options; a choice of language to search in (almost 50 different languages), the search box itself to enter terms, a tick box to tell the engine to search for the exact phrase, and options to search for web pages, new, pictures, videos, MP3 files and FTP files. An important fact to note is that with AllTheWeb you can search directly in news- something that can't be done with Google.

AllTheWeb has one of the most customisable interfaces I've seen in a very long time.

The search results page more than make up for some of the other less exciting features. The screen is clear and uncluttered, with none of those 'featured sites' that are becoming increasingly common with other search engines, such as AltaVista. At the very top of the list of results are a number of 'Beta Fast Topics' which are a dozen or so specific topics related to the results retrieved - rather like the Northern Light customised search folders, and which provide the same function - a quick way of narrowing a search down to a smaller tightly focussed group of pages. AllTheWeb provides a brief summary of the page returned, the size, and if appropriate, the opportunity of retrieving more hits from that specific site, using the same approach that AltaVista uses. Another nice feature is that even if the user does a search for web pages, a small box pops up on the right hand side giving the results of a multimedia search, with an indication of the number of hits found for images and video.

In conclusion therefore, AllTheWeb combines many of the best features of other search engines, with few of their disadvantages. That combined with the freshness of its data does make it look a very attractive alternative to Google, and worryingly for AltaVista, a very viable replacement for their own offering. I suspect that in the coming few months I shall be paying rather more visits to AllTheWeb, and rather less to AltaVista.

See here for the complete article written on this subject including actual comparisons Goodbye Altavista, hallo AllTheWeb

Did the patent office even try a Google search before stamping its approval on this patent?

Obviously not: http://www.google.com/search?q=web+checksum

Hit #2 is prior art: "BIBLINK.Checksum - an MD5 message digest for Web pages" . Note that: "This article last updated/links checked on 23-Sept-1998"