A Web Developer in Winnipeg
There’s been a lot talk in the mainstream press about growing dissatisfaction regarding Facebook’s complete disregard for privacy. Prominent nerds are quitting or threatening to quit Facebook. On today’s Buzz Out Loud they suggested that if Facebook doesn’t change their course soon, this is going to be worst than the Myspace exodus.
My only question is, where are you going to go? Friendster?
Twitter just launched a little tool designed to make it easier to embed tweets into your website. Currently blogs tend to paste in tweets whenever a twitter source requires reference, as Twitter explain in their blog post “…a pasted-in image of a tweet is a bit of a hack. We have a simple alternative to propose…”
All you have to do, in theory, is load up Twitter’s “Blackbird Pie” tool, enter a “full tweet URL” and voila, neat little embedded tag.
Unfortunately, the HTML code it currently outputs is a massive pile of garbage. By massive, I mean really massive; embed code is running well over 1kilobyte. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Seriously, try it out! The HTML is pretty garbage-tacular too. It spits out an inline <style> tag in an attempt to replicate the native twitter.com profile style of the cited user. I guess they’re trying really hard to replicate the look of a screenshot.
There are numerous problems with this implementation: 1) <style> is inside <body> won’t validate in current Doctypes (AFAIK); 2) I can almost guarantee that the majority of WYSIWYG editors and/or output filters will barf up the inline style – wordpress certianly does; 3) even if you are able to post the embed, it’s quite likely that RSS readers and some browsers will ignore the <style> tag, rendering your embedded tweet illegible; 4) some of the key class names they’ve chosen – eg. timestamp, author, metadata – are not very unique and could potentially have existing styles assigned to them.
There is no real indication that this tool is experiment or “alpha,” just a short “use at your own risk.”
Blackbird Pie does not taste good. They should not have released this on a public server, it’s embarrassing.
Judy Wasylycia-Leis, Winnipeg’s only official mayoral candidate announced her candidacy 1/2 an hour ago.
At the time of writing, neither her official website or facebook fan page have been updated.
Fail.