Background: The Australian federal government has finally pushed out a web site publishing performance metrics for all schools throughout Australia. There has been much brouhaha regarding this. For some reason, the go-live wasn’t a quiet one, but a very loud, flick-on-the-switch big-bang go live.

Naturally, the website asploded.

Any website that’s going to be hit by 1% of the Australian population the moment it goes live is going to blow up unless there are some cluey, experienced people behind it. Clever, inexperienced people, or experienced idiots with a large budget might stand a chance if things got progressively worse over time, but turn it on and hammer it on day one? MySchool.edu.au does not have cluey, experienced people behind it. There are various signs.

For a start, what is it with the TLD? .edu.au seems fine, but what’s wrong with a redirect from .gov.au given they were the folks running around promoting it? It’s not like myschool is an education institution.

Then you get there. Guess what? It won’t work without JavaScript. At all. Because typing in a string and hitting enter demands the availability of JavaScript. Using <form> is so 2000s. Get with the new decade! It’s so vital to the site that users must not be allowed in if they don’t have JavaScript. Screw the blind! They’ve only got one school to go to anyway.

And the site is slow, amazing slow. But I guess if you’ve got to download all that JavaScript to enter that string, of course it’s going to be slow. Switching to a different set of data? Couldn’t download that and just do a hide/show, no you’ve got to do some kinda AJAX-y postback crap for a massive round-trip delay; if you were dealing with rapidly changing data, that might almost make sense; every year this website will get data updates, so no: this makes no sense. I clicked on it, and a long time later, something happened to the web page. In the meantime, I went off to get a drink. Alternatively, you could just show a table for each year, and skip the damn JavaScript altogether. Why there’s even a backend is beyond me, this whole thing could be served perfectly well – and mind-numbingly quickly – from static pages.

And for the purpose it’s intended for: parents picking a school for their kids. Can you compare schools? No. Open them up in different browser tabs, if you have a tabbed browser (remember: the blind can go take a flying leap). Good thing the site is chocked full of JavaScript. And the JavaScript is used for handy things like map-based locating of schools, and – oh, hang on, no it’s not. There’s no Google-maps mash-up. Good thing the site is chocked full of JavaScript.

Clearly, the entire site has been an exercise in some programmer somewhere bolstering their resume rather than giving the client something appropriate. Either that, or a manager was in charge of the feature spec, and demanded all the latest buzzwords that they had heard but didn’t understand. I’m betting it took more than a year to build. Feel free to speculate.

I’m also willing to bet the price on this site was more than the $50,000 it should have cost (one person, three months). I’m imagining about two or three orders of magnitude more. I’m figuring the servers required for this aren’t running in some guy’s bedroom, even though that would be about all that’s required for such a simple dataset that’s presented in such a straightforward way.

Must try harder.

I have an ANZ Bank account. Using their website to pay bills is an exercise in frustration. I only have one account, but the website insists on me picking it out of a dropdown with two entries – the first one, the default, instructing me to pick an account. Failure to do so results in an error – “Please choose a From Account.” I only have ONE! Assume that’s where I want to pay from! Then one must pick who to pay, with an option to pick previous billers from a drop-down list. If you pick from the dropdown without javascript enabled, you get the error “Please select a biller from the drop-down list or enter a biller code.” – with javascript it fills in a few fields for you, but why does it even need you to fill those fields in if you’ve picked your biller already? Fill them in when I click the “I’m done” button!

Finally, we come to a bugbear I have with ANZ currency fields. You can’t enter a dollar amount, it has to include a decimal point with two following cents; they can’t infer from a lack of a decimal point you’re talking about a dollar amount. They inforce this rule on their website, and they insist that at an ATM you enter the number of cents you wish to withdraw from the ATM. Given the smallest unit of currency available from an ATM is $20, what is wrong with this picture?

This guy’s gone to the trouble of finding out how to add “Did you mean?” to your own website’s search.

Kyle Scholz has developed code to represent Force Directed Graphs in Javascript, and you can interact with the nodes. We’re talking mathematical directed graphs here – you might know them as networks.

Basically, there’s a bunch of nodes and they settle themselves into a stable state minimizing tension between them – the graphs balance themselves out, and you can see it happening – it’s animated. And interactive – you can grab a node and move it around. It is ubercool.

Downside is that it sucks huge CPU.

Look, I know it’s just visual wankery, but it’s pretty and easy to use!

Sitepoint tries to figure out how well the Web2.0 works for blind people.

Basically, no US gov website, and none that loves blind people, will be able to implement a AJAX-only site – a noscript verson will have to be available. And this stems from the fact that it’s too hard to make the various screenreaders act in a standard way in response to changes to the document. Which sounds to me to be a perfect problem for World Wide Web Consortium standardisation.

Just out – Google Web Toolkit – Build AJAX apps in the Java language. Hmmm, Java = write once, run anywhere. Should be included in most browsers. But this thing compiles java into javascript….

okay, no, seriously, what? Why are we skipping over the sandbox and into the browser?

Two new AJAX have been released recently.

Yahoo AJAX Patterns has code and a set of patterns published under a BSD/Creative Commons license.

IBM’s AJAX Toolkit Framework is IBMs version.

Of course, Microsoft have their own version, called Atlas that’s built into ASP.NET 2.0.