Who says TV and radio people can’t write good headlines for the web?
CBC.ca criticial error: news not found
Published December 16, 2008 9:40 am
The Tea Makers
They offered me the office, offered me the shop. They said I'd better take anything they'd got. Do you wanna make tea at the CBC? Do you wanna be, do you really wanna be a cop?
3 Comments
Well, does that tool write HTML and CSS to the homepage? Or does it just populate a template with CSS specified by someone else? I suspect the latter.
Then again, I obviously don’™t know what I’™m talking about. Nice to meet you too, Anonymous.
Joe
In this case you don’t know what you’re talking about. The Editorial Publishing Tool was a huge boondoggle that cost the CBC millions, created by Claude Galipeau and Sue Gardner (one reason both left the Corporation). No one in the management or technical side of .ca actually listened to the people actually did the work. Galipeau, Gardner and Dube and those techie programmers all knew better than the working class on the 4th floors.
Things are better now. With news becoming a management priority, management is forcing the techies to listen to people. But it will be years and huge amounts of dolars before it is fixed.
Unfortunately I have some sympathy with the developers here. It is hugely difficult to generate a Web template that can accommodate arbitrarily-long headlines (measured in number of lines) that also adheres to a grid and does not cause the rest of the page to bork. If we didn’™t have to support IE6, this might be easier.
The problem here is essentially the same as the translation problem: Text may end up being longer than you expect (in e.g. French, German).