h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A couple of years back, before the BBC got all OTT about branding its web pages, h2g2 page titles were simple and functional - 'A forum conversation', 'Peer Review', 'Post to a conversation', 'The Moonlight Towers Austin, Texas'. That made it easy to see which tabs applied to which page in Mozilla, and on the task bar of the browser.

But now it's 'BBC - h2g2 - A forum conversation', 'BBC - h2g2 - Peer Review', 'BBC - h2g2 - Post to a conversation', 'BBC - h2g2 - The Moonlight Towers Austin, Texas', and all you can see in each tab is 'BBC - h2g2...'. Not functional because every tab says the same thing and there's no way to easily switch straight to the the tab I'm looking for by reading what it says on the tab. In fact it's a real pain in the bum, especially when trying to comment on an entry in PR and having several tabs open including one for the entry itself, a couple of tabs for different pages of the conversation, and one for the reply I'm composing.

I think I know what the answer's going to be, but is there any way we could get rid of the 'BBC - h2g2 - ' bit and go back to just the title of the page?

And just on the offchance - is there any way we could get rid of the BBC logo icon in the address bar and replace it with the h2g2 logo?

What he said

Oh... seems the wheels are in motion...

<./>Development-Features#conversations</.>
Titles of Conversations - Consider putting the name of a Conversation/Forum in the title of the window showing it, so people can navigate more easily through histories in their browsers.

That's not exactly what I was suggesting, but it's a damn good idea

> "is there any way we could get rid of the 'BBC - h2g2 - ' bit"

Perhaps the people who use customisable browsers (and already have little macros to reference and time-stamp previous messages and add back the bold, italic and underline which the MBs used to have) could also strip away the junk the BBC now puts at the start of titles. I do agree that it renders the titles pretty useless once you've got more than a couple of windows open (from anywhere) on your screen at once.

Gosho, <> I think it is exactly what you were suggesting... the title is implemented in the html

Have a look at the code behind any web page (in Mozilla - via the View\Page Source menu, in IE and Opera via View\Source ) and you'll see something along the lines of

Some words that actually mean something

At the moment, h2 pages have titles like so:

BBC - h2g2 - Peer Review
BBC - h2g2 - A Forum Conversation
BBC - h2g2 - Welcome to Raphael's Silver Cloud Lounge - U147203

etc

I have no reason to doubt that SEF's idea would work but the suggestions could be (very) easily implemented from the h2 server side...

As could resetting the icon - the 'neighbours' have a very simple guide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon

Traveller in Time counting tabs
"I know the sequence of the first five, try to limit the number of conversations and entries open at one.

I think the best we could get is something like:
BBC Peer Review - h2g2 -
BBC A Forum Conversation - h2g2 -
BBC Pyhtonist Society - h2g2 -

This would already be better. "

If what you're saying is 'change the title page to reflect more accurately the page in question by, for instance, replacing 'A Forum Conversation' with 'Page titles and icons' *and* getting rid of 'BBC - h2g2'', then we're in agreement, but I suspect that they won't to go for the second part of that plan. It's the 'BBC - h2g2' bit that I realy want to consign to history. I'm familiar with what favicons are but not too much of the background and geekery behind them.

We are in agreement!

"... favicons ...the background and geekery behind them"

It's all v simple - it must be... it took me less than 20 minutes to create and implement THREE icons on a website that I maintain

The method is 'supported' by the w3c, although there are "limitations"
http://www.w3.org/2005/10/howto-favicon

However, as the BBC are obviously using a 'favicon' already, I can't see the 'limitations' being a barrier

Interesting!

I had an idea to incorporate green line on black icons like simple images from the Guide to represent tabs, or, after reading through this thread, for the bbc themselves.

The less text, more life forms could use it...

Thomas Grey

I note that collective has its own favicon, so it seems there's a precedent for h2g2 to have ours too...

The other thing that they could do with the 'BBC - h2g2' bit is put it at the end of the string ie
'A forum conversation - BBC - h2g2'

but since when ie7 comes out of beta all the major browsers will support tabbing, I want to add my vote too.

Knowing how obsessed the BBC is with branding these days, I'm not holding my breath. Although, with the BBC favicon appearing on the tabs you'd think they wouldn't need to repeat it by adding 'BBC - h2g2...'.

For those using Firefox, there's something of a workaround available via a nifty wee extension called Tab Mix Plus: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1122/

Under 'Display' there's a [Tab] tab () that has a tick box for <>

Of course, it only works on pages that you have bookmarked... but its better than zip in the interim