[HN Gopher] BBC Betsie: Perl program to create an automatic text...
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BBC Betsie: Perl program to create an automatic text-only website
version (1999)
Author : samwillis
Score : 55 points
Date : 2022-02-19 09:07 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| pxeger1 wrote:
| > the BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites
|
| Wow, they still use this exact disclaimer 23 years later, to the
| letter.
|
| (I wonder why they need it...)
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| They've used it from day one, more or less.
|
| Disclaimers like this used to be a little more common on the
| web, as I recall.
|
| But the BBC is a national broadcaster and news organisation. I
| think you have to keep in mind the volume, nature and often
| bad-faith unfairness of the kinds of complaints it receives.
| It's not difficult to imagine the "I was on the BBC website and
| two clicks later I was looking at bestiality material"
| complaints, tabloid news stories, extreme right wing/left
| wing/nationalist politicians etc.
|
| A disclaimer like that shoots down that entire range of
| complaints and was probably constructed with Ofcom's agreement
| for that reason. (They are the relevant regulator.)
|
| If you google "BBC disclaimer" you'll see there's a bunch of
| them they have had to construct over the years to fend off bad
| faith complaints from all sorts of angles.
|
| (And one or two good-faith complaints that stem from their
| peculiar position, like the "Other listings magazines are
| available" disclaimer they have/had to make when they mention
| the commercial TV/Radio listings magazine, The Radio Times,
| that is produced under licence. That disclaimer has entered
| into popular culture and is the basis of a running joke among
| BBC presenters at times when a contributor inadvertently
| mentions or places a product. "Of course, other <insert product
| category> are available.")
|
| NPR is in a similar situation, I imagine -- having to put
| disclaimers into their content to protect themselves from the
| kind of bad faith criticism that will get brought up the next
| time their funding is being discussed.
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| I'm sure non-British HNers have nothing but a positive
| impression of the BBC, are aware that it showcases Britain in
| a positive light, and therefore find it beyond baffling that
| it is the target of so much vitriol at home from, ahem,
| certain quarters.
| bW9yYgo wrote:
| qiskit wrote:
| Anyone remember the Perl vs Python online battles of the early
| 2000s? It's shocking how decisively that debate has been settled
| 20 years on.
| benjamir wrote:
| First thing I notice: the license is horrible.
|
| Even GNU recommends liberal licenses for snippets with less than
| 300 lines (and allows for commercial use anyway!):
| https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html " What if the work is
| not very long? (#WhatIfWorkIsShort) If a whole
| software package contains very little code--less than 300 lines
| is the benchmark we use--you may as well use a lax permissive
| license for it, rather than a copyleft license like the GNU GPL.
| (Unless, that is, the code is specially important.) We recommend
| the Apache License 2.0 for such cases.
|
| "
|
| While LOCs poorly reflect the effort made, in this case a less
| anal-retentive approach would have opened up a long-term
| contribution to societies at large. Considering that the BBC was
| mainly finances by quasi-public money it's a shame that it was
| opted for a license with an unnecessary special case (NC).
| iso1210 wrote:
| > Considering that the BBC was mainly finances by quasi-public
| money it's a shame that it was opted for a license with an
| unnecessary special case (NC).
|
| Unfortunatly this is why it has to be licensed in that way.
| Having the BBC release code for free to commercial use is often
| deemed to be a "market distortion", and thus not allowed to
| happen, as such the lawyers will often err on the side of
| caution.
|
| Also remember this was 1999, 5 years before Apache License 2.0
| was approved.
| zinekeller wrote:
| > Having the BBC release code for free to commercial use is
| often deemed to be a "market distortion", and thus not
| allowed to happen, as such the lawyers will often err on the
| side of caution.
|
| People outside the UK: this isn't just theoretical, please
| look at the history of BBC Micro. That's how the corporation
| was structured at the time, and it should be read with this
| in mind. There are _a lot_ of very fine pieces of BBC
| software that is stricter than that and can 't be legally
| released to the public, for example most broadcasting
| software like its MPEG2 encoder aren't available because
| it'll disadvantage broadcast equipment manufacturers
| (although for the MPEG2 encoder FFMPEG's is now better). This
| is also not specific to the BBC: before its disbandment, the
| Independent Broadcasting Authority (which owned half of the
| transmission network in the UK, the other half was previously
| BBC but both were privatized and now owned by Arqiva)
| required to do product development and research _by law_ but
| can 't commercialise those research by themselves.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Very true. I've mentioned in another comment the "Other
| <product category> are available" disclaimer, that used to
| be tacked onto any content mentioning The Radio Times or
| any of the BBC Gardening/Good Food/Sport products from BBC
| Enterprises or licensees.
|
| It's now a running joke, but the disclaimer about The Radio
| Times really did emerge out of a market distortion legal
| complaint by a competitor, TV Times.
|
| These market distortion complaints were often timed around
| BBC Charter renewals to give the BBC's critics in
| Parliament (generally on the Tory side) ammunition. But at
| the same time, it's also the era of the Radio One Roadshow,
| the BBC Micro as you say, the emergence of the VHS box set,
| etc., etc., and the BBC did need to be required not to
| distort markets accidentally as it expanded commercially
| (which ironically it felt encouraged to do in order to find
| future non-licence-fee revenue)
| zinekeller wrote:
| It's a little bit complicated but before 1991-1994 (where
| there are large-scale changes outside of BBC), Radio
| Times were exclusively for the BBC while TV Times were
| exclusively for the ITV companie _s_ (yes, ITV wasn 't
| just a single company those days!), Channel 4, and S4C
| (technically there is a third one, Channel Times, but
| that's for the Channel Islands which has a very
| interesting ITV setup at that time).
| adw wrote:
| The ITV network still isn't a single company! STV
| (Scotland) is not owned by ITV plc.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Yeah -- I remember more than a full decade of two
| listings magazines per week!
|
| To break it down a little for non-British HNers (it is
| very confusing and messy):
|
| The BBC does not run adverts, but it does have a carve-
| out from that to mention its own associated products in
| limited circumstances. Most significantly the listings
| magazine, The Radio Times.
|
| We start out in the situation zinekeller mentions where
| the BBC listed BBC TV/radio channels in The Radio Times,
| and TV Times listed programmes from the ITA (Independent
| Television Association - ITV/C4/S4C/London Weekend
| Television etc.)
|
| But then you get a situation where TV viewers are buying
| two increasingly competitive magazines each week just to
| get the full listings. As satellite and cable TV appears,
| this becomes unfair on the consumer (to the benefit of
| the BBC) and it has to change.
|
| The disclaimer came in part from those publications
| seeking and being granted access to the listings data
| that the others were publishing. TV Times got access to
| BBC listing data, and Radio Times published the ITA
| channel listings.
|
| But the BBC was and still is able to mention the Radio
| Times, whereas TV Times cannot advertise on the BBC. A
| market distortion.
|
| I suppose there must have been calls to ask the BBC to
| get out of the listings magazine market (I don't remember
| anything specific) but ultimately the disclaimer ("Other
| listings magazines are available") was imposed on the
| BBC.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| I should correct myself above because the group wasn't
| the ITA, it was the IT _C_ A -- the Independent
| Television Companies Association. Which is now UKIB:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Independent_
| Bro...
| samwillis wrote:
| > I've mentioned in another comment the "Other <product
| category> are available" disclaimer
|
| And the tape over product logos and labels to hide them.
| quesomaster9000 wrote:
| Wow this brings back memories. While it was tedious it's
| something which has humbled me over the years.
|
| Due to various laws we had to guarantee accessibility of most if
| not all 'official communication' to native speakers of several
| languages and various (dis)abilities. With some minor structural
| tweaks and guidance from an 'accessibility coordinator' who
| worked at a college we were able to realistically make it very
| accessible to the 1% (or lower) of the population who rely on it
| for their own independence, but the changes and influence
| permeated from the ground up and IMO made everything better for
| everybody.
|
| Remember when websites let you choose the font size? Actually
| sitting down with people who have difficulty seeing was
| insightful, most of them found the font size adjuster widgets
| were useless, poorly located, too small or had low contrast (so
| as to not annoy the sighted visitors, the irony) - instead
| preferring to switch over to the text-only version (if available)
| and using keyboard shortcuts or browser settings to adjust font
| size.
|
| Likewise with screen readers, we spent a lot of time annotating
| images and structuring links, content & context so that it made
| more sense and was generally predictable. We had to use them
| ourselves in the same way that you'd check a design across
| various tablet / mobile devices and browsers.
|
| Unfortunately this kind of effort isn't made very often outside
| of government and charity websites these days, but accessibility
| software has also gotten much better over time (I was absolutely
| blown away when a blind guy showed me how he used is iPhone, it's
| much more efficient than normal visual use for core
| functionality).
| samwillis wrote:
| I posted this as I think it's fun to look back at how some
| "early" web stuff was done and a bit of a trip down memory lane
| on a Saturday morning.
|
| When I was experimenting making websites as a teenager 20 (ouch!)
| years ago I would love to investigate how other sites worked. The
| BBC had this little "Text Only" link on all pages of the site
| that redirected to a version stripped of all images and tables
| (tables were used for layout, much like HN) with high contrast
| and large text for the visually impaired and screen readers.
| Brilliantly ahead of its time thinking about accessibility, which
| I suppose is the BBCs mandate.
|
| The url to these pages were prefixed with something like /cgi-
| bin/betsie.pl?url= and the bottom of the pages liked to this page
| I have submitted (sadly now only in the Internet Archive), it's
| affectively a proxy written in Perl that transforms each page on
| the fly. I remember setting Betsie up on my own site, which no
| one visited because who would visit the site of a 14yo.
|
| I believe Betsy was still in use till about 2010. You can read
| more about it here:
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2012/02/accessibilit...
|
| Source code:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20000824120750/http://www.bbc.co...
| mmaunder wrote:
| I worked for the BBC in 2002. I created OneMusic which
| showcased unsigned bands. You can see an archived version here:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20050416110703/http://www.bbc.co...
|
| Within 2 weeks we managed to get our first band signed. A
| Swedish band called Maas. I worked with a producer Andrew
| Barron, who takes a lot of credit for seeing the project past
| the finish line. Andrew sat with me over a weekend and deep
| into a Sunday night to get it finally launched.
|
| The project was written in mod_perl and was designed to be
| extrememly high performance because Radio 1 at the time (and
| perhaps still is) the most popular radio station in the UK. And
| we expected a surge of traffic every time the DJ mentioned
| OneMusic, which is exactly what we got.
|
| I was based in Oxford Circus and I worked with the ops team
| which - at the time, and I'm not sure if this is still the case
| - was based out in some mansion in the country somewhere. They
| had a kind of Bletchley Park vibe about them - this team of
| absolute gurus who you only got to speak with over the phone,
| and who would somehow make your application handle the massive
| amounts of traffic that would be thrown at it. They did a great
| job hosting that application on Apache/mod_perl in the dark
| days before Nginx was invented.
|
| One of the absolute worst design decisions I made was to design
| the application so that it would support sessions for users
| without cookies enabled. Which is why that Archive.org link has
| the OMSID query string parameter in it. The app would
| dynamically modify all URLs on the page to embed that assigned
| session ID so it stuck, even if you didn't have cookies
| enabled. It would follow you around the site as a query string
| param. I stupidly suggested the idea to Andrew and he was like
| "Hell yes, lets do that!" and so I did. But it had big
| performance implications as the URLs had to be dynamically
| generated for every pageview, and it added significantly to the
| time it to for me to create the project. But hey, we did it,
| and got it launched, and it actually worked and provided
| sessions for users who had cookies disabled.
|
| The project taught me a lot about high performance websites,
| delivering a critical project on-time to a big audience, and I
| went on to create WorkZoo (Time Mag top 50 website of 2005)
| which I sold, Feedjit (live traffic feed on over a million
| sites) and my current cybersecurity business Wordfence which
| employs 40 and is the best available security product for
| WordPress. I think creating all those projects set me up to
| create a WordPress plugin that is high performance, widely
| compatible, very stable, and delivers on user satisfaction.
|
| When I left the BBC, the team bought me a bottle of Gran
| Centenario Reposado tequila out of their own money. I'll never
| forget that and I'll never forget them. Such a great group of
| people.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| > One of the absolute worst design decisions I made was to
| design the application so that it would support sessions for
| users without cookies enabled.
|
| I think we all did this at least once back then and all
| regret it for the same reasons...
| cnorthwood wrote:
| I'm guessing the mansion was Kingswood Warren, where BBC
| Research was based before cuts relocated them to London:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/
| mmaunder wrote:
| Sounds right.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/buildings/kingswood-
| warr...
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Great flashback. I used Betsie on several projects in the early
| 2000s.
|
| It was quite useful when you were stuck with baroque HTML
| generation code you were unable to modify.
|
| The BBC produce a bunch of interesting tools for web
| development, another being the layout comparison tool, Wraith:
|
| https://bbc.github.io/wraith/
| forinti wrote:
| Wow, it only includes Socket.
|
| You could make this a bit simpler nowadays with some libs like
| Mojo and LWP.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Or you could really go easy on yourself and not use Perl. ;-)
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(page generated 2022-02-19 23:01 UTC)