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Site Review: 2002 Olympics
Andy King writes: "If Olympic Web sites were an event, Salt Lake wouldn't even
take the bronze. Our review reveals some gnarly accessibility
moguls." There's another review of the site which mentions the many accessibility problems that the Sydney Olympics had with its website. The site doesn't appear to work at all with konqueror.
The biggest accessibility mogul in my mind, though it really doesn't have to do with the usability of the site per se, is the restrictive conditions put on independent Web media reporting on the games. I believe the IOC did not give credentials to most Web media and have been very active in shutting down and censoring both pro-athlete fan sites and anti-IOC sites. (In fact, wasn't there an athlete who was enjoined from posting even an Olympic diary, Weblog style, for fear of IOC reprisals? Someone refresh me on the details if this rings a bell.)
Anyway, expect the only thing on the Web related to Olympic results of stories is the officially santioned site and NBC and the big media outlets who paid out their butts to cover the games. Everyone else is shut out. That's my accessibility mogul. (Gah--can we fire whoever came up with that expression?)
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
Heres the address: http://www.saltlake2002.com/
What do you expect. If you make a product that competes agressively, and you spent money to buy the rights to show the olympics online, are you going to cater to your product or to all?
Sure, your conscience says "To all, because that's what the olympics stand for!" But in capitalists minds, its "Crush the competition"
In the end, its both legal, and the way of our economy. So, basically, "tough sh*t".
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
One of the greatest features of the Sydney 2000 website, was the "... By Country" - So I could select my country (Denmark) and I would get access to all the information that involved the danish athletes.
I was in Nevada on an extended vacation when they were hiring for the lead on this project, I thought well if they pay over 120k ill live in SLC with my family for a year. I sent in a resume for kicks and grins, we discussed pay and they said with my experience that wouldnt be a problem and was promtly called in for an interview. It wasnt in the door 60 seconds when I realized they dont have a clue . It was a NIGHTMARE of politics and group confusion. I left and thought yeah a cold day in hell before Id do that, I told them I wasnt interested and was still called back several times. POLITICS reighn supreme in SLC when it has ANYTHING to do with the Olympics, Mormons were running the show, no ifs and or buts, the labor for everything was based on nepotism. My family has ins out there and told me what was actually happening behind the scence, I didnt belive it UNTIL I went to the interview.
A camel is a racehorse built by a commitee, On guy says, it needs big feet for traction, another sys, it needs long legs so it can run fast, another says it need big nostrils so it can breathe well while sprinting, You END up with a CAMEL, The olympic web site is no different....
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Actually, I hear that every 50th page served by their website shows two young men in suites carrying the Book of Mormon and asking if you like to discuss your religion with a virtual representative...
Of course, I shall be watching closely as my three wives are competing in the synchronized swimming competition.
They're not even making any money off the site AFAIK, unlike some sites that don't work (airline sites mostly) without IE5.5 and a lot of good luck.
IMHO it could be a lot worse, as well as a lot better. Usability nuts seem to forget how businesses actually work (which is to say, barely, on most days).
I run Linux full-time at home on my laptop, and use Windows full-time at work (mostly because Windows Media doesn't run natively in Linux, and Real is not representative under Linux of how it runs in Windows -- and our streaming media clients are the biggest source of support calls). Normally I just expect incompetent web design. By my standards, the SLOC website is not half bad, just wickedly slow.
YMMV...
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
The modern Olympic games are just a friggin' waste of TV time, and just one more thing in human culture that has been taken over, lock, stock and barrel by megacorporations and their sponsorships. Yeah-- like these athletes really got that way by sucking down Big Macs. Riiiiiiight.
The last time the games really mattered was in 1936, when Jesse Owens beat out Hitler's alleged Master Race competitors. It's been all downhill since then. All that's left now is a corporate-sponsored hollow shell. I'm surprised they haven't destroyed the last bastion of tradition and redone the torch to look like a big Bic or Zippo.
Face it, the most Olympic-related fun you can have nowadays is by dusting off your old Commodore 64/Atari/Apple II/what-have-you and loading up the old Epyx "[season] Games" titles.
~Philly
Is that many people don't have broadband at home yet. Heck, the recent slashdot poll had 19% of slashdotters using dialup. That number has to higher for the Jane Imacs and the Allen Oscar Littles. Now between the Flash, Video (Quicktime and Windows Media?), and Actobat files this has got to be a bandwith hungry sight. Unless they feel most people will be viewing this at home they are probably shutting people out.
Sean.OutaHere()
Usability issues aside - with the Olympics being, you know, an international event, you'd expect translations of the page in at least the common European languages plus Japanese and a few others, right?
Whoever had the foresight to exclude all languages other than English and French is a complete moron, and stands to further propogate the idea of the self-serving American (i.e.: "everybody should speak English!"). To make matters worse, the French site follows none of the English site's design conventions (perhaps a good thing!) and has the personality of a dehydrated camel - there are no images on the site's content pages, for example.
Also, not to be troll, but honestly, guys... when the top story on the front page is a lambasting of the usability of a website, it's a good thing to provide a link of some sort to the site, ya know?
...why not buy one of their Unix Servers or Cisco Routers.
I Heart Sorting Networks
After attempting to get W3.org's HTML validator to check the entire page, I finally just checked the main frame. Notice that I had to force HTML 4.01 Frameset, since the document does not include its own DOCTYPE.
Results can be found at this link. Needless to say, the site failed miserably, even with Frameset set.
iCab's built in HTML checker found 238 errors in the main frame alone, not to mention the dozens of errors in the surrounding frames.
Note that I am not suggesting that the writers are ever going to write strict HTML or XHTML (although they should for accessability), but that writing *such bad* HTML that some browsers choke on it is simply unacceptable *for anyone*, especially a web page like the Winter Olympics site.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
We should meet for Coffee to discuss this... oh, wait... how about beer? ... oh, yeah... Well, maybe we could just go dancing... Doh!
Hmmm... Tell ya what, I'll talk to yer sister/wife and set up an appointment.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
In prior years, the olympics.com sites were handled by IBM. They did a great job, considering the way that the web and the Internet were growing through those years. Here's a report they created discussing the their "User-Centered" design approach. For a cool example of a portion of the site targeted for the people at the events, check out the details of the regional weather site they did.
They broke several Internet world-records each year (most hits in a day, hits per minute, etc) they ran the technology using the Lotus Notes Domino servers on RS/6000. The story I heard was that IBM had faced all the tech challenges it wanted to, and that the inter-personal challenges were making their involvement in upcoming olympics less attractive (ie NBC being a pain). I remember at the time that I chuckled to myself "lets see who else thinks they can pull this one off!"
Now that Microsoft is involved (remember when they blocked non-IE browsers from their MSN site?) I'm not surprised at the results so far.
p.s. The fact that the site is not international, here in the year 2002, is an absolute shame! Hell, the 1998 site was at least in English French AND Japanese !
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
The fact that the website runs IIS and is incompatible with Lynx says nothing about the character of the people who live in the state. Not everyone is an incompetent MCSE (I, for example, have written several useful projects).
Surely I will get moderated down for this post.
-nitrogen
A solution to the problem with music today