As I’ve written before in this blog, the new BBC Homepage is somewhat annoying when viewed on my iPod. Now with the new News pages, they have somehow managed to cripple the Landscape mode on Safari on the iPod. This what you get when you load the website, then rotate the iPod. The navigation panel on the left is now hidden for some reason, which stays hidden even when you then rotate back to portrait, and notice the space on the right… for some reason the page “shifts” over to the left rather then filling the screen.
(apologies for the terrible focus, the protective cover doesn’t play nice with cameras).
This on top of a number of other rendering errors that mean the page doesn’t resize properly and the text is a bit harder to read. This is due partly to the fact that wider pages need more scaling to be used on a mobile platform. Pity that we couldn’t just use the flow layout for the text…
Brilliant. So not only do I need a new widescreen laptop just to read a story, I can’t use a mobile variation either.
I’ve been whinging about the exact opposite! I’m using a widescreen laptop (800 glorious pixels high), and am spending all my time scrolling up and down the BBC News website, as the whole thing has more whitespace.
Perhaps it’s just that we’re used to the old (easy-to-read) website, but finding things on the homepage and section pages is a lot harder now.
(And thank goodness for AdBlock Plus on Firefox. Why on earth would I want to buy a Rolex or invest in a er ‘green’ {cough} multinational oil company from the BBC?)
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PS: It’s the stupidly tall BBC + BBCNews double masthead that annoys me the most!
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PPS: You can’t completely blame the BBC webbies for Safari:IPod’s inability to render. That fault may well lie with Apple’s Safari team, especially if it renders correctly when you first go to it in portrait mode (See this guy’s interesting and well-balanced discussion on web and data-format standardisation: http://tinyurl.com/36nxvw :D).
Internal Memo to Greg: Fill in those TPS reports and make sure you fully compose your thoughts before commenting on blogs, as three separate comments is a bit greedy! 😀
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Been using the BBC news site regularly since I got my iPhone last year. These “improvements” miss the mark by a mile. One step forward, two steps back. A shame.
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@Hugo/Greg
Gah, attempting to hoist me by my own petard ?! 🙂
But interestingly, both our issues might be solved by allowing the layout to flow to the size of the device viewing it… which I seem to remember was one of the principles you were supposed to adhere to when coding HTML tables (that and not use Pixel values, but we know what happened to that…).
However the relative size of those “tall” mastheads I think is a direct reflection of the assumption that everyone is using a much larger resolution screen, however I do also wonder if the BBC assumes everyone uses a full-screen browser.
Interesting point about finding things.
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Hugo (and anyone else), as you’re using Firefox you can use userstyles to “fix” many the new BBC News site problems (also works in Opera).
I’ve put instructions on my blog.
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Cheers Dan, that’s made life a bit easier for me. I might need to build a proxy or something for my iPod though as it is a Safari device.
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Hmm, I don’t get this issue on my iPod Touch (unless they’ve fixed it already).
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