Page Division WTF



  • Once in a while, when reading MSN, I come across a page split that only contains a couple of words on page 2 and makes me wonder why they even bothered.
    This isn't newsprint. There isn't a need to have a second page at all. Maybe it gives them more ad exposure. Who knows.

    An article from this morning brings things to a new low.
    http://tv.msn.com/tv/article.aspx?news=284902&gt1=7703



  • @Erick said:

    Maybe it gives them more ad exposure.

    Yeah.  One guy seeing two ads is twice as valuable.  I also wonder if they think some stupid person will read the textual ads at the bottom thinking they're the last page of the story.

     That and I'm sure they didn't put a lot of thought into the code that splits up everything above a certain length.
     



  • Aggressive Mediocrity, Inc.

    Now, there's a great name for a company.   



  • Access to that site cause firefox to ask me about 7 sites wanting to set cookies. Seven. wtf.



  • To come to their defence (I know this is rare of me), but they are probably using a script to generate the pages and not have much control over content length of these pseudo-pages



  • @DigitalXeron said:

    To come to their defence (I know this is rare of me), but they are probably using a script to generate the pages and not have much control over content length of these pseudo-pages

    Then that script is WTF.

    Fair enough they probably didn't imagine this outcome when they put it together, but a) it's an easy fix, and b) whether they need to split stories up into pages is debatable in the first place. 



  • A script that splits the final fullstop of a sentence onto a new page is a WTF in itself. It makes no sense in terms of content presentation nor in terms of how sentences work. That one has to be deliberate. Like there's a "feature" in the program that makes it find a way to force 2 pages even if there's not enough content.



  • @DigitalXeron said:

    To come to their defence (I know this is rare of me), but they are probably using a script to generate the pages and not have much control over content length of these pseudo-pages

     I worked on a system once and had to implement pagination. I thought about using automated ways of splitting up the content, but eventually settled on having the article author write in some string of characters that was to represent line breaks. I figured that the author would know better than some script how to split up his pages. It worked pretty well, too :)
     



  • @DigitalXeron said:

    To come to their defence (I know this is rare of me), but they are probably using a script to generate the pages and not have much control over content length of these pseudo-pages

    Orphan-line suppression has been a solved problem in automated page layout since forever.



  • @Carnildo said:

    @DigitalXeron said:
    To come to their defence (I know this is rare of me), but they are probably using a script to generate the pages and not have much control over content length of these pseudo-pages

    Orphan-line suppression has been a solved problem in automated page layout since forever.



    This is worse than an orphaned line. It's bad enough that they will split pages mid-sentence, but in this particular case, the only content on page two is the last period of the last sentence, followed by the copyright notice. It is absolutely pointless and therefore Worse Than Failure.



  • @Kemp said:

    A script that splits the final fullstop of a sentence onto a new page is a WTF in itself. It makes no sense in terms of content presentation nor in terms of how sentences work. That one has to be deliberate. Like there's a "feature" in the program that makes it find a way to force 2 pages even if there's not enough content.

    It's not deliberate, it's the shortcoming of the simplest solution - to split the page every x characters, or slightly better, on the space immediately before/after every x characters. Getting a full stop alone could just result for a careless/ignorant author putting a space before a full stop .

    While it's a WTF, it's (to a degree) excusable.
     

     
     



  • @m0ffx said:

    @Kemp said:

    A script that splits the final fullstop of a sentence onto a new page is a WTF in itself. It makes no sense in terms of content presentation nor in terms of how sentences work. That one has to be deliberate. Like there's a "feature" in the program that makes it find a way to force 2 pages even if there's not enough content.

    It's not deliberate, it's the shortcoming of the simplest solution - to split the page every x characters, or slightly better, on the space immediately before/after every x characters. Getting a full stop alone could just result for a careless/ignorant author putting a space before a full stop .

    While it's a WTF, it's (to a degree) excusable.
     

     
     


    .



  • @m0ffx said:

    It's not deliberate, it's the shortcoming of the simplest solution - to split the page every x characters, or slightly better, on the space immediately before/after every x characters. Getting a full stop alone could just result for a careless/ignorant author putting a space before a full stop .

    While it's a WTF, it's (to a degree) excusable.

    NO ITS NOT EXECUTABLE ITS DUMB FOR SOMEONE TO DO THAT



  • I think a better split-page incident would be a page two that contains a sentence effectively retracting the entire story from page one. Er...

    "The submitter later confessed that the revealing photos of the candidate were photoshopped and no wrongdoing had been committed."



  • @purge said:

     NO ITS NOT EXECUTABLE ITS DUMB FOR SOMEONE TO DO THAT

     

    wow, purge, having a bad day or something?  Is it because your caps lock key is stuck on?

    More shouting

     



  • The people who have been pointing out the declining quality of the non-Side Bar WTF posts are correct.  Granted, the site relies on user submissions and I've never offered anything, but I''m considering some.  I know, gimme a focking A for effort, but I've always gotten my jollies from the comments.  Judging by the reaction to some of my sarcastic posts (all caps included), this forum is quite flame-retardant, which is nice. 




  • YAY! And there's more of the same BS about not BROADCASTING a WEBPAGE.

    "Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights
    reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or
    redistributed.
    "



  • @purge said:

    The people who have been pointing out the declining quality of the non-Side Bar WTF posts are correct.  Granted, the site relies on user submissions and I've never offered anything, but I''m considering some.  I know, gimme a focking A for effort, but I've always gotten my jollies from the comments.  Judging by the reaction to some of my sarcastic posts (all caps included), this forum is quite flame-retardant, which is nice. 

     Agreed, about the forums and the FPP has gone massively down hill, can we conclude that there are less WTFs happening or that the small % of people who submit front page stories have run out of good ones?  Maybe us sidebar posters should start trying to make some front page submissions
     



  • The SideBar's gone downhill a bit too. Make it so the topics are sorted by creation date again! There always seemed to be more new topics and less off-topic discussion back then.

    (And yes I know this is off-topic discussion)



  • @fluffy777 said:

    YAY! And there's more of the same BS about not BROADCASTING a WEBPAGE.

    "Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed."

    So something on the web is never going to be broadcasted? Ever? I've seen plenty of shots of webpages shown on the TV, most importantly the BBC showing a shot of the pirate bay when the HD-DVD key was splashed over it. Besides, they're not talking about the literal thing you're seeing on your screen, they're talking about the content, which is subject to the usual copyright laws.



  • @Kemp said:

    @fluffy777 said:

    YAY! And there's more of the same BS about not BROADCASTING a WEBPAGE.

    "Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights
    reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or
    redistributed.
    "

    So something on the web is never going to be broadcasted? Ever? I've seen plenty of shots of webpages shown on the TV, most importantly the BBC showing a shot of the pirate bay when the HD-DVD key was splashed over it. Besides, they're not talking about the literal thing you're seeing on your screen, they're talking about the content, which is subject to the usual copyright laws.

    Never mind screenshots, read it out verbatim on the TV or radio. That's broadcasting it. The copyright remains in force through a change of medium or format, hence why fan-made sheet music and song lyrics are still copyright the owner of the copyright for the song.

    However, it DOESN'T necessarily remain in force if it's rewritten. That bit is bullcrap, unless they're trying to claim an implicit contract, which I hope wouldn't hold in any competent court.



  • @m0ffx said:

     fan-made sheet music [is] still copyright the owner of the copyright for the song.

    The music labels like to claim that a lot, but there's damn little legal basis for it, and it goes against hundreds of years of practice. It's probably also completely impractical; if we had followed that rule for the past hundred years, there wouldn't be much new music around. There just aren't that many original phrases that sound any good, and writing down music by ear is about as creative as making it up in the first place.



  • @asuffield said:

    @m0ffx said:

     fan-made sheet music [is] still copyright the owner of the copyright for the song.

    The music labels like to claim that a lot, but there's damn little legal basis for it, and it goes against hundreds of years of practice. It's probably also completely impractical; if we had followed that rule for the past hundred years, there wouldn't be much new music around. There just aren't that many original phrases that sound any good, and writing down music by ear is about as creative as making it up in the first place.

    Modern copyright law full stop goes against hundreds of years of practice. Writing down music by ear may be difficult, but it is not truly creative. And it can be considered fair use or otherwise legal to incorporate (sufficiently small) portions of other works into your own. Software provoked lively debate over whether there is a minimum length of a copyrighted work, given a few brilliant lines can be worth much more than thousands of banal ones.


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