2004-12-12 #1

FTA and the "freedom" to present data

FTA means (amongst probably other thing) Free-To-Air. This is a generic name for satellite TV channels that are broadcasted w/o encryption. Anybody that has a DVB card can tune in to a satellite and watch these channels. Most of the "known" TV channels are not FTA, but there are a lot of channels that are, and the radio is supposed to be awesome.

Now to get to my point; it took me over an hour to sift through sites to start to find out what channels are FTA and on which satellite I can find them. The presentation of the sites is so bad, you can't even imagine. The channels are shown in lists/tables; most of them w/o links to their respective websites. Nowhere could I find links to the programm listings on those channels. The data is partitioned usually by the country of origin of the channel, not by the channels available in one location. I live in Toronto. It doesn;t interest me all canadian channels, but the channels availalbe here in Toronto, being canadian, american, mexican whatever.

Part of the problem with presentation is that the data is changing often, so it is hard for the webmaster to maintain any cool web pages. Also, he is probably not one of the most skilled web designers ever.

The problem here is that the guy who has the data, has to do the presentation too. I've done my share of web programming, and there are simple and beautifull ways to show data, and there are UI guidelines, but this guy doens't know them. Why is it so hard to offer simple presentation for web sites? MVC is often applied to web sites, but in the wrong place, behind the scenes. MVC should be applied from the point of view of the user. M is the data, and the owner of the website has that. C is the controller, that is the browser. C is very primitive nowadays, part of the problem being the misunderstood web-standards song. Now, V is the real problem. V can be achieved by the owner of M on the M machine by picking a nice way to encode to html before sending it to the user.

This has to change. Maintaining a website should be as simple as putting the data in an excel sheet and offering some default view templates. To go one step forward why does the owner of the website have to impose his presentation layer upon the user? What I propose is having V given to the user. Data should be offered in xml, over a web service, and the user could have a few presentation engines that he can be apply over the data. Of course, he would get a default presentaion from M, but not in the form of already rendered data, but in the form of a V engine (think xslt files). The point is in giving the user the ability to change V, by giving him ways to store V in the browser cache, and offering help about the data format, so as to make changing V easier. For the browser to be a controller, the browser should incorporate ways to offer control to the user over M. Which browser nowdays does that? None. They offer control over V. Now, give me an editor to change V and filter the data, and then show it to me and the browser would be a real controller.

But there isn't any such system available yet. The user ultimatelly is the receiver of the data, knows how he wants to digest it, how he wants to see it. He can work his templates to fit his needs. To contrast, nowadays people use presentations that are known to fit all types of users, or simply they don't care and offer presentations that are only liked by them, the authors of the data. As long as the data can and should be standardized, all web browsers nowadays can do xslt on the fly, and the templates can be stored locally on the hdd.