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

"Sc**thorpe"?

What do you mean difficult? We've written loads of stylesheets without a schema.

well that's not a very good example to set it it?

Oh, I dunno. As Greg Dyke (Director General of the BBC) would say, 'cut the crap'. Things like schemas always turn up later, like documentation and marketing requirements. How else do you think we managed to create h2g2?

I guess if you put it like that;
and a schema wouldn't really be very useful, it's hardly like an entry is a complex database entity of linked rows and lots of exciting datatypes .

I haven't read all of this thread, but in response made early in the conversation - that two pages come up in the BBC search engine for each h2g2 page, for the two skins - perhaps it's worth putting a norobots command at the top of all the Goo pages, so that only the Alabaster ones are indexed by the Google engine?

Heresy!

*laughs* I thought somebody might take objection to that. I only mentioned Alabaster as that's the skin that visitors (newbies or people not logged in) see when they first come to the site. Could use Goo of course... Or even 360...

Actually, if you had read the backlog you'd have seen that Jim's already applied a fix which means that search-engine results are no longer skin-specific...

Oh right, OK. Next time I'll try to be less impatient and I'll read the backlog

it is kind of long - maybe in a future update you can create a summarize thread tool, listing the major points in each thread in a brief format

What, like a little icon instead of the "bullet point" next to each posting in the left-hand list...?

e.g.
= Tech question
= tech answer
= off-topic asides
= Flame
= cross-thread SPAM
= Amiable newbie who has wandered in by accident

that would be nice but who would do it?
as you post?
the italics?
or better still something else for the ACES.

Heck, the Moderators have to look at every post anyway...

Gee am l Busted hahahahaha

I was thinking of something more automatic like the auto summarizer in MS Word.
It could summarise things, you could give it a score on how well it had done, and then it could learn for next time

Can you imagine something like that trying to summarise the potted history of rabid weasels, or some similar insane researcher ramblings?

Hey, I have difficulty imagining the search engine indexing words like "worblesneng"...

(It might be fun someday to get a list of the words which are in the search engine index, but not in the dictionary... Once the obvious mis-spellings were removed, it could make a fascinating bedtime read... )

Slightly off topic, but when TDV were doing Starship Titanic, they put the complete text of the novel by Terry Jones on the website, sorted alphabetically.

Apparently, an executive at the publishers asked 'What if someone was able to reorder it and get the book for free?'