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After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

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Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#21

Post by archangel_one »

zrail wrote: post #10
rwmj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is so clearly not britannica.com. That site doesn't even work without javascript, and where the heck is the "Edit" button?

Citable facts published by someone reputable are extremely important. Wikipedia is very much not that. britannica.com could very well be a citation for a wikipedia article but never the other way around.

Ultimately that's not going to be as important as Wikipedia having stolen the mindshare - it is now the place people go to in order to look things up. It's all very well Britannica claiming to be more citable, but in practice Wikipedia wins because it has far more articles with more detail in them. If the fact you want to cite is not on britannica.com, you can't cite it from there.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#22

Post by chc »

rwmj wrote: post #9
starfox wrote: post #5

“Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.” The future is clearly http://www.britannica.com

The future is so clearly not britannica.com. That site doesn't even work without javascript, and where the heck is the "Edit" button?

I just tried it without JavaScript. It works. It's not pretty, but it's fully functional as far as I can tell. They basically have two different UIs — if you have JavaScript, you get a modern UI, and if you don't, you get a simpler UI that's optimized for a very primitive browser (e.g. those old phone browsers that could only do 32KB per page or whatever it was). Seems fair enough. If you really can't get on there, you might want to check your connection or something.

But hypothetically, even if it were completely JavaScript-dependent, the trend is clearly toward sites that involve more JavaScript, not less, so I don't see why that would preclude being "the future."

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#23

Post by colanderman »

xxpor wrote: post #20
rwmj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is so clearly not britannica.com. That site doesn't even work without javascript, and where the heck is the "Edit" button?

I think it's ridiculous in this day and age for people to expect webpages to work without JS.

Web applications, maybe. But content which is primarily text? I like my text not to be Turing-complete, thank you.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#24

Post by Volpe »

rwmj wrote: post #14
zrail wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citable facts published by someone reputable are extremely important. Wikipedia is very much not that. britannica.com could very well be a citation for a wikipedia article but never the other way around.

Fail at step 1 because I cannot even get to the site (and more importantly, neither can Google), because Britannica does not understand how the web works ... 11 years after the web ate their expensive lunch meetings, they still don't get the web.

Interesting that we now think "The website is broken" because google can't index it... rather than "Google is broken" ?

I remember reading somewhere google executes javascript as part of its crawling...

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#25

Post by lonnyk »

rwmj wrote: post #14
zrail wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citable facts published by someone reputable are extremely important. Wikipedia is very much not that. britannica.com could very well be a citation for a wikipedia article but never the other way around.

Fail at step 1 because I cannot even get to the site (and more importantly, neither can Google), because Britannica does not understand how the web works ... 11 years after the web ate their expensive lunch meetings, they still don't get the web.

Google has parsed and indexed info thru JS for a while now. [1]

[1] http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4159807.htm

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#26

Post by saryant »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #18
mynameishere wrote: post #15

Back in the day, it was a great product. My family had an edition endorsed (in the first pages) by Queen Elizabeth II and Richard Nixon, and I can't calculate how many hours I spent leafing through the pages. I guess that's been replaced by Wikipedia's "Random article" link, but with EB you never got crap about Pokemon.

There was huge value in thumbing through these as a child. We could never afford the set, but I had used copies of individual volumes and I spent many, many hours reading random topics. You just don't get that kind of discovery in an online version. Maybe you could, but you don't.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#27

Post by [deleted] »

xxpor wrote: post #20
rwmj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is so clearly not britannica.com. That site doesn't even work without javascript, and where the heck is the "Edit" button?

I think it's ridiculous in this day and age for people to expect webpages to work without JS.

[deleted]

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#28

Post by drucken »

xxpor wrote: post #20
rwmj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is so clearly not britannica.com. That site doesn't even work without javascript, and where the heck is the "Edit" button?

I think it's ridiculous in this day and age for people to expect webpages to work without JS.

Oh, really...

In an age,

* where the Internet can be seen on ever increasing number of diverse devices

* where every day people discover that every additional layer of software complexity adds security vulnerabilities

* where the default installation of even many existing heavily used browsers, for both personal and business, have everything except html and stylesheets disabled, especially for new sites

* where some/many people may wish to choose to use your site in its most bare form possible, including command line users

* etc.

you choose to ignore all of these usage scenarios by not even having a graceful fallback for your site?

Thankfully, most web administrators and developers are not as short-sighted as you, even most start-ups!

One more thing: if a new site, even one that has been heavilty recommended to me, does not provide even basic information without scripting or has a horrible front-page with a default NoScript Firefox installation, I treat it as I would a spam site and I immediately desist from using the site and ignore the link.

You will not waste my time with lack of basic Web competence and awareness.

Re: After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

#29

Post by [deleted] »

xxpor wrote: post #20
rwmj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is so clearly not britannica.com. That site doesn't even work without javascript, and where the heck is the "Edit" button?

I think it's ridiculous in this day and age for people to expect webpages to work without JS.

[deleted]
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