I’m going to start a series of postings while I’m here in Korea aimed at highlighting websites in this wonderfully internet-wired country which are poorly designed, filled with coding errors, and essentially unusable for anyone who does not use Internet Explorer and Windows. I can only hope that web designers in Korea will increasingly work towards creating standards compliant web sites that work regardless of browser and platform.
Disaster Site: Korean Studies NET
Link: http://ksnet.aks.ac.kr/
Problem as of June 29, 2007: 1) Membership page located here is a very simple web form. Can be created with a few lines of code and any server based scripting language. There is no excuse for a simple form like this not to work. However, when filling the form out in Firefox or Safari browsers on a Mac, you will get error messages. Furthermore, if you load this page with the Firefox “Error Console” showing, no less than 7 errors appear in the CSS and other loaded code for the page. 2) Pressing on “advanced search” produces a cute little timer which never ends, you are never redirected to the advance search page.
Stubborn, stubborn Konrad – why can’t you just accept that fact that PCs rightfully rule the world?
Good idea. Cataloging all these problems might eventually get some attention paid to them.
We actually had someone from AKS come and talk at a workshop at SOAS last week about ‘cultural content and cultural informatics’, which basically means putting Korean studies stuff on the web. I meant to corner the guy at some point and complain about this stuff, but unfortunately never got the chance. His name is Kim Hyeon and he’s ‘professor of cultural informatics’ at AKS, so he might be somewhere to start.