Slashdot Mirror
Encyclopedia of Life Launches First 30,000 Pages
An anonymous reader writes to let us know that the Encyclopedia of Life opened up to the public today with its first 30,000 pages in place — and, according to the AP, promptly crumbled even before being Slashdotted. (The site seems fine now.) We discussed this project last year when it was announced. The Telegraph has an overview of the launch, and reports that only 25 "exemplar" pages on the site are fully fleshed out to the extent scientists hope eventually to attain for all species; the other few tens of thousands are expanded placeholders. The project hopes to begin taking input from citizen-scientists late this year.
They are separate projects, with TOL being less well funded basically, and smaller in scope. I believe that TOL have shared their data with EOL.
Johns: Well, how does it look now? Riddick: Looks clear.
Try http://eol.org/ not http://www.eol.org/. Yeah, how dumb is that? Could be a bug in their firefox support though.
It's slow, only has demonstration pages and is extremely badly designed.
As somebody has already mentioned, images don't have alt tags, but also there are tables used for layout (with many empty rows/cols for no apparent reason) and there are image maps. The site uses an XHTML doctype, but isn't valid XHTML. There are missing slashes for closing single tags. The divs for the popups are contained outside the body tags, that's NOT ALLOWED!
That's all I see, what about anybody else?