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

Depending on the new owner we may not get any say at all.

There's a depressing thought.

However, given the wording on the For Sale sign I don't think that'll be the case. So I shall add my own thanks to Nick.

I don't think someone who wouldn't give us a say would buy us in the first place.

Have a bog brush:

Actually, it's quite simple. If a buyer doesn't accommodate the community, doesn't attend to our concerns, takes this place in some direction we that isn't acceptable to us, they'll find themselves with an abandoned site.

I give as examples, Digg and Gizmodo. Both recently made drastic changes to their sites and both experienced significant losses in traffic. Regular users of both sites abandoned them in droves. There's a natural feedback.

I hope it won't be an issue, but there's really little that we can do other than voice our concerns and continue contributing to h2g2.

Sorry Nick but you should be arguing the h2g2 cause with your peers.
When the DNA Hub was initiated it promised that all pages of such sites driven by the engine would carry the message 'Powered by DNA the BBC's community Web site Engine'. Later the front page of the Hub was changed and that commitment was removed (Ask Peta). At that time it looked as though the DNA community sites may well come together under one banner. That banner could have been h2g2 by another name.(The Blizzard) The original commitment to the name of Douglas Adams could have been honoured. As things are going the dna connection is being removed from the URL and the BBC are disposing of the Douglas Adam's dream despite having ripped the heart from it to power their message boards and other sites requiring a website community. Ten years it has taken, ten years of lost opportunity, leading to todays situation where the BBC support Blogging, Twittering and any form of online communication except the one in which they had the lead.

>>I've worked for people who were fond of saying that function should take precedence over form. What if form and function are joined at the hip, though? << paulh @75.

Yes, form & function should go together.

Is it not a sign (the sign?) of a mature technology that it's easy to use? Taking a as tester,
The car is a case in point.
Mobile 'phones etc are not.
Computing seems to be heading there in some ways, but.

The existing skins seem to have paused on the brink. Barlesque is a backward step from them.

I love the whole form over function stuff. I&#39;ve seen too many designers spend way too much of a project&#39;s time tweaking a bit here, a bit there, adding a bit here, removing a bit there only to find when they finally allow the developers anywhere near it they&#39;re told that half the stuff&#39;s impossible and the other half there&#39;s no time left to build. So they go away and start again.

Figure out the function, then make it intuitive to use, then make it look good.

There are magical moments when you have something that functions well and is intuitive, and it looks attractive. Even the colors and ocntrasts can be functional if they make reading easier and less headache-prone.

I suppose in web design, as in architecture, there are four schools: form follows function, function follows form, form allows function, and form and function.

Unfortunately, a lot of designs fall under category 4

Anyway, to go all archi for a moment, the expression "form follows function" was by no means intended as a demand for the austerity we see today - just that the function should be readable from the finished design. The phrase was coined by Louis Sullivan in his 1896 article "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered" - and the full quote is very applicable to h2g2:

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
Of all things physical and metaphysical,
Of all things human and all things super-human,
Of all true manifestations of the head,
Of the heart, of the soul,
That the life is recognizable in its expression,
That form ever follows function. This is the law.

There's a discussion happening over here in this thread on page design: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/F20154027?thread=8073299 It'd be nice to have some input there too

>> "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered":
...form ever follows function. This is the law. <<

Always wondered who said that and why.
And the when of it is important too.

Yes, an 1896 skyscraper could be considered artistically
as a form that existed only to function. It's not the Law
but it's the inevitable result of corporate management.
The most important line to be drawn is the bottom line.

~jwf~

Ummmm... Perhaps Tavaron could paint a better 'For Sale' sign ?

! Martin
---
I thought I heard a Dolphin Whistle ...

>>Yes, an 1896 skyscraper could be considered artistically as a form that existed only to function. It's not the Law but it's the inevitable result of corporate management.
..<< : ~ jwf ~

Yes. Some more modern ones are intrinsically attractive, beautiful even, but there's one thing very wrong with them - they steal other people's sunlight.

The John Hancock Builidng in Boston http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/peihancock/peihancock.html attempts to atone for the "stealing other people's sunlight" sin by being encased in glass, which makes it seem like a very large mirror. Te upper stories of it seem like blue sky because that it was they are reflecting.

I've long been a devotee of the architectural renderings and utopian architectural musings of Hugh Ferriss: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Ferriss


Although Ferriss was not an architect nor a city planner, his work illustrates very well the happy result of the meeting of architects who wanted to build ever taller buildings and enlightened planners who wanted to ensure that sunlight still reached the street.

I recommend his works very highly.

But this has little to do directly with the redesign and sale of us, except perhaps to point out that sometimes exquisitely happy design solutions grow out of what at first seem to be restrictions.

H2G2 probably isn't blocking anyone's sunlight, thank goodness.

In any event, I hope that our discussion of the possible relations between form and function is helping people to get a clear idea of what they would like this site to be like for the best results. Sometimes a few well-chosen words can bring about new insights...

>> This is the first stage of the formal process for a possible sale of H2G2. <<

Interesting choice of words that keep reoccurring in BBC announcements, I wonder if they were deliberate. Does this mean the sale of h2g2 is not a given? Are they prepared to discuss alternative options? Would they be open to, say, the h2g2 community offering to pay for the server space and Eds time in a private/public partnership deal that would leave the site where it is? These are things we should know.

Hello Raddox

Do you mean rent the site from rhe BBC

Radox - that's exactly the sort of things that we expect to be given to prospective buyers. Nobody can make an effective bid without that sort of information.

The problem is that the information will have to remain secret throughout the bidding process until a buyer is announced (and possibly after then, it will depend on the secrecy arrangement).

With all due respect, I am still not following the logic of announcing the sale of an Internet site in a print venue but not an online one. Will online announcements follow? This reminds me of the blind butler and deaf-mute cook in the movie "Murder by Death." The butler doesn't know the cook is even there, and the cook has no idea what is expected of her. By the same token, those in the online community who don't read print publications may not know our site is available for sale.

(Hopefully, this is a matter of relying on a print version as a legal "notice" of the proposed sale. Lots of publications have print versions and online versions, and they may not have the same information at the same time.... Will it all get smoothed out in time? I hope so.)

Paulh, it may be a legal requirement to place a print notice. Legal notices appear in print in our country too. But yes, it seems ironic when the asset is online.