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

After reactiviating "my space" everything looks garbled because the option for html has been removed so that only guideml and plain text are available. Is this because it would take too much time to POLICE html entries on peoples pages?
If i'm wrong then please put me right,

fabbers

It's because HTML provides far too many ways to access off-site (and therefore potentially illegal) content, such as pictures, sounds etc. It also constantly gave us a headache when looking at h2g2 on other skins and platforms - HTML is a pain when you're dealing with data mining.

So we decided to remove the option, as anyone who can write HTML can write GuideML, with a little bit of effort. And it's well worth it, even though there's a little inconvenience to start with.

Hope this helps.

Mark

I created some logos for a couple of my enteries, the H2g2 Astonomy Society and the cafe Nervosa (all about Frasier). theres are on my exterior webpage and so now are gone. Are you going to have a survice where we can request to have our pictures vetted and turned into blobs? This would be really quite cool.

Also can we all purchase *@h2g2.com email addresses? This would be super cool, though I guess it would be @h2g2.bbc.co.uk, which doesn't guite work as well.

Anyway I'm exceedingly happy to be back home, it was getting hary but I'm here, I really hope we haven't lost too many people. And The BBC should do us prowd. Or could we become the leading face of the BBC? That would be cool!

Yeliab

OH CAN I ALSO HAVE A Latté?

Sorry, the latté comment crept into the wrong post there. Oops.

Cheers for that MArk

looks like i'm gonna learn guideml,

I need a drink

fabbers

How is it that a company as big as h2g2, or even bigger like the bbc, can not do what has been done on a number of sites that I know of (including my own). Relatively simple html is no problem at all to data mine, or to keep used properly. If you confine the external referencing to '' and to '' then it is simple to check for linking as well. I as a single programmer haverunup a programme that scans an entire website (or any new page) for external references, and it is both fast (a few seconds per page), and simple (a couple of hundred lines of code). If I can do it, why can't you?
Also, I have a picture on my page. I took it myself using a digital camera, it is also of me, and by me, and I hereby grant myself the copyright on it. now why can't I include it without having to get you to convert it into a non-standard format, which I can then not process to improve it?

HTML only pages have been disabled as an option - GuideML pages still support a limited amount of HTML - eg A HREF still works in GuideML pages, as does IMG SRC (on internal files). Sounds a lot like you're suggesting exactly what h2g2 has done

The basic problem with external images is that there is no way of knowing that the image is actually of you, taken by you etc. I myself bare a striking resemblance to Buffy the Vampire Slayer - so whilst those images may look like vid caps from the TV show - they are actually pics of me

It doesn't matter how long it would take a program to list the image URLs - what does matter is how long it would take someone to check the actual images at regular intervals for copyright, suitability etc.

I don't know where h2g2 has offered to convert your images to any format standard or otherwise - but h2g2 image files are generally gifs & occassionally jpgs - hardly non standard.

;^)#

They have not offered to convert my images to a h2g2 format, they have insisted that all used images be internal to the bbc, probably hijacking copyright at the same time, and certainly taking quite a while to get added to the internal pool (if they will add them at all).
PS I am not suggesting that they do what they have already done, I am complaining that theyhave basically called a halt to almost all creation for images for h2g2 pages, due to the impossibility of replacing or updating them.

Ahh, sorry I misunderstood.

I don't think there'd be any difference in the copyright situation where the images were hosted offside (in the old manner) & displayed here - under the old & new T&C's anything you post on h2g2 grants them a copyright on it. It is arguable that coding something so that it displays as part of an entry is posting it here.

;^)#